Alison Stine

All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl who loved her scabs, the blood shields her head gave up, her face a sun of blank amazement. She drew.This means love: a circle with a line through it.More work: a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed through fields. Ice river, the pages of our notebooks. Outside: limbs and roads and wires. Outside cracked with force and turning. Our poems filled with salt. He took me to his bed. The writer never speaks. The writer speaks in details, the sateen lining of my coat, the star point of tongue kissing. The winter speaks in the whip. Runoff nixed with ash. I spilt water on my notebook. Words went back to ink; paper back to ruffle, pulp.You smell like dog, the girl said. You will be left like the winter. Little sputter in the car’s craw. Little crevice in the pavement. Ice reminder. He took me to his bed, saying:Ali, Ali, tell no one.

Sugar dries on paper plates. The cake’s decimated and barely touched. What to do with the balloons? A few float listlessly, unattached, still bearing like bandages the tape that bore them to the wall. They’ve gone dull, rubber tips darkening to a bottle’s pinch. It’s too late, or too early. There are too many on the floor, stirred up as I stir. In the end, I cut them, urge a blade into the inch between knot and blossom. Slow deflation. It reveals what they are: sacs of plastic, stale with air. I’ve seen this before, in the newspaper picture of Nefertiti, bound in the antechamber of a tomb, cast out of favor, her body, barely wrapped. How they know her: by the queenly jaw, age of limbs and teeth. Also, by the broken mouth, smashed by priests so she cannot eat, cannot breathe in the afterlife.