Alison Stone’s latest collection, Ordinary Magic, was published by NYQ Books in 2016. She is also the author of Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), Borrowed Logic (Dancing Girl Press 2014), From the Fool to the World: Poems in the Voices of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Parallel Press 2012) and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. She is currently editing an anthology of poems on the Persephone/Demeter myth.
Believe Me
Listen while I bare my soul, I say. I lie.
With at least one word each day, I lie.
A friend’s triumph wakes the worm in my heart.
Wonderful, hurray, I lie.
The white-haired sea heaves itself toward the moon.
On a wave-worn rock, face toward the spray, I lie.
I love his thick fingers, the emerald snake
inked on his back. He loves the way I lie.
Bills blizzard down, erasing our home. My
son clutches his bear. Everything’s ok, I lie.
My mother thinned to wind. When she whispers,
goose-flesh dots my arms and branches sway. I lie
in bed past the alarm’s blast, dream-drunk
and heavy. Blankets in disarray, I lie.
May I be excused? the children ask. May
I peel you off like corn husks? May I lie?
To each animal its nature. Birds fly,
cats grab things that dangle. Children play. I lie.
You ask for my true, hidden self, your arms
open like wings. To my dismay, I lie.
On a stone-strewn path, I pause and kneel; recite
words of surrender. Even when I pray, I lie.