• {Click here for PDF version}

    Memoir

    pink sponge curlers with closures
    that snapped into place

    the thud of a green tennis ball
    struck against the back of the house

    milk in an aluminum cup, the red one
    my favorite

    smoke from Salems drifting out
    across a tar-mended street

    five sisters, one brother
    a house of brick and sighs

    until the day people arrived
    bringing all those hams and casseroles

    go ask the neighbors for the story of my life
    a narrative easily structured around emergencies

    the sentences are written
    inside the wall of my chest



    The Subject Is Not Loss

    but an afternoon with you
    on an empty beach years after.

    Not the ones who are gone
    but the ways we see them in each other.

    I read a letter from my father to my mother
    when he was in the Navy 65 years ago—

    you said I talk like that
    when I unbutton your shirt.

    On the shore your face strained
    by laughter is washed in sun.

    The recognition in our gaze
    is cumulative.

    Every morning I wake
    to watch dawn unfold over the harbor.

    At night I crave to go back into
    the conversation our bodies have in sleep.

    Alison Prine’s debut collection of poems, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Field, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She lives in Burlington, Vermont where she works as a psychotherapist.

    SHARE
    Previous Post: Sheep Machine Pre-release Reading at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop Next Post: Two Prose Poems by Michael Trocchia

    Archives