Origin Stories - Alison Stone

    Reverse Ghazal
    by Alison Stone
    (for B.)

    Secrets that lips hold back, the body shows.
    Be gone, Sun. In moonlight, the body glows.

    Rittenhouse sobs he shot in self-defense.
    Entry wound in the back, the body knows

    otherwise. The heart houses love, pumps blood.
    Is illness chance or debt the body owes?

    Top model insists she’s not beautiful,
    just knows how best to turn the body, pose.

    Another face on faded tacked-up signs.
    River thaws, carrying the body, flows

    to the ocean’s mouth. Cow down in a field.
    Cackling and flapping near the body, crows.

    Every religion claims its miracles.
    Awe-struck disciples swear the body rose.

    Reason trumped by a hot butt in tight pants.
    Though tender boys abound, the body chose

    a cad. Where’s the wisdom? So far aging’s
    bringing loss, aches, decay. The body slows.

    So many iterations of hunger.
    The soul craves poetry, the body, prose.

    Stop fighting, the blizzard whispered. Snow’s soft.
    Lie down. Not found for weeks, the body froze.

    Tubes to clean. Broth to lift to grey-tinged lips.
    Final acts of love – wash the body, close

    the eyes. Blue plus-sign on the peed-on stick –
    A new soul settles in. The body grows.

     I’ll stay and haunt you, Stone assures her kids.
     But can she? What’s left when the body goes?

Origin Stories – Reverse Ghazal

I had been working with ghazals for years and was starting to feel that I had exhausted what I could accomplish with the form. Then I had the idea to switch the positions of the rhyme and the refrain and see what that would do. I love the ability to jump from topic to topic and having the form make cohesion. Kyle Rittenhouse was on trial, and I was disgusted guessing, correctly, that is crocodile tears would get him acquitted. I was thinking about bodies in general, their pleasures and vulnerabilities. The poem came pretty easily.

BIO

Alison Stone has published eight full-length collections, To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), 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. 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 Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com. YouTube and TikTok – Alison Stone Poetry.