Click here to watch Alison Stone read her Christmas poem. Her new book is Zombies at the Disco.
Alison Stone
Tactile Ghazal
Locked down with family, I’m blessed with touch.
People-heavy days, pets give the best touch.
Nine Minutes (i.m. of George Floyd)
Five hundred forty seconds.
Time in which an athlete
Can run a mile and a half.
A couple can have rushed,
Workday-morning sex.
A teacher can teach about the stars.
A killer can keep his knee
On the neck of a man.
America Hunkers Down
Hands scrubbed till they bleed.
School replaced with videos.
Carts crammed with toilet paper and guns.
Caught in the Myth: Poems by Alison Stone
Your editor’s response to Alison Stone’s new book Caught in the Myth, echoes the last s-y line of her poem “Dionysus”: “Let the words to every song be yes.” Stone has always done Dionysian better than most yes-men. That’s because she doesn’t shut her eyes and ears to what’s really real. Heroin or her cunt may have been her chariot to a “sacred other place” but she’s fully alive to what’s going on in our mean world (“thick with caste”).
Nile. Hudson. Rio Grande.
i.m. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and Valeria Ramirez
Razzle Dazzle: Alison Stone’s New Poems
Alison Stone has been a vital voice in First of the Month‘s mixes for nearly 20 years. The following poems from her new collection, Dazzle, testify to her undimmed instinct for happiness inside the dailiness of life. Not that she’s Ms. Beamish. Stone often gives First first shot at her more engagé poems. One of them recently got up Facebook’s nose.
There Is No Gun
There is no gun in this poem.