Your sneakered feet shade
the limp-petalled lilies, ferns
burned brown in their pots.
Crouched on the glass roof,
you hug your knees, hiding
from Father, who enters like an angry
god to grant water
from a cracked green can.
Mottled pansies droop in a row,
purple as your mother’s eye, bright
as the knife you grabbed
and pointed at his chest
to make him stop. How long
can you wait here, August
sun branding your neck?
How long until somebody sees?
Alison Stone has published five full-length collections, Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, a book of collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. A sixth, Caught in the Myth is forthcoming from NYQ Books in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. She was recently Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete.
