The therapist urges, Feel everything.
Don’t make an ordeal about everything.
Love takes off our layers. Kept promises
and sustained tenderness peel everything.
We had a democracy, a middle
class. Will the one percent steal everything?
The weak suffer from our violent hungers.
In the butchered pig’s last squeal, everything.
My cat grown blind and boney, broken by
time. What fool said it can heal everything?
The earth freezes. Seeds wait. Lost high school best
friend, found. On life’s turning wheel, everything
cycles back. The neo-Nazis march. Dog-
whistle slogans don’t conceal everything.
Breasts sell cognac and cars. I’m saddened by
my sagging. Is sex appeal everything?
Still, in dreams, the towers fall. Ash-coated
ghosts. Our city turned surreal, everything
altered. In grief, we turn to chocolate, God,
the government. Appeal to everything.
So many sweet flavors of avoidance.
Alcohol offers a deal – everything
you want to feel for everything you are.
She kissed Red Regret to seal everything.
Safer to blend in, to stay quiet, small.
What Kaepernick risked to kneel — Everything.
Wise, greedy bodies teach — We’re all death-row
inmates. Choose for your last meal, everything.
Stone stands by Truth’s highway, sign aloft –
Will work for words that reveal everything.
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.
