While you fry eggs at the break
of morning, steam rising, I fill
my mouth with glacial stones:
spit-shine them glossy again. Ancient
ones, million-year suckers, moon
rock or purpled, ecstatic white.
On the car hood, needles of pine ash
floated down from the woods surrounding.
A new world order. At noon, you slice
tomatoes so thin I could cry. I love you
like that: ready to tip over. The stones
keep me steadied. Tomorrow, the red
squirrel will shower our tent in dozens
of pinecones, yelling. We won’t try
to calm her, or run her off—we’ll yell
too: all this abundant living.
Everything hurdled at our soft
heads. Pinecone, stone, this slipping
heart. I hand you a mussel flattened
into wings. In our small human living,
we try to make room
for all of it.
—
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.
