Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Mantic (Augury Books), Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming, Cherry Grove). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines including Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, Switchback, Konundrum, New Delta Review, Versal, Typo, and Barrow Street. Her awards include: Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She edits poetry for Poemeleon, and teaches locally through the Inlandia Institute and online with the Rooster Moans poetry cooperative. Her website can be found here.

 



The three windows of your house appear a flooded horizon. Lakes inscription, or a conviction of newness. Pale sleeves, the front shadows, constellations cross an emptying shoreline, death’s disordered border. A secret path, scented bergamot. I’ll send you a postcard to the stars in chance. 

Delivery and failure. The street lamps angles of leaves. 

I stand at the wardrobe touching your dresses, speech matching the shape of old conversations. Your voice, an air among the dreamless lens. Earrings a clover field, now sky a crook in the drape of multitudes. My language, my variegated wheat without origins. Lightly I press my fawn hooves to soil. Stamp of arrangement, rise now through reeds. Moss grows over this shelter. The violet solitude prayer makes of home.