Sara Jane Stoner

Something About You

Who picked the song out on the pole-struck knoll from the
sculpted pique please of not-knowing you too can be crushed
that reason for everything the objectless clarity in the simply
can’t imagine what the light would do behind that body and all
along inside my joy wail tricking vertical coming to whistle up a
full metal density could be my cute iron singing to the earth it
wants.

But for whom and how a fast a gradual dimming for whom and
how the howls are felt are play are real your diamond dreams
that sickle shape—knife or cradle redundant fist the cut the
soothing pound all that besidesing.

Make it elegant this time your retreat indefinite colonial
subscript conscript prescript to a sulk of perverts delightful
perverts and a murder murders of common supremacists all
that working inside your amnesia the working amnesia
marking your nipple as message (smoke and music) sex in a
corner of light so right so wrong threw that whole body on the
chord.

A massive thinking kind of plunges off the surface through the
hole where answer’s other lives sulks and murders grinding
your rages in shadows on the sun-crusted naked of the summer
wealthy brilliant worship new kinds of dumb.

Do you do you want to be a comet trailing money rainbow
bearded I’ll be working on my if I’ve transcended cis-men
kissing with their secret insides. Let it be said on the knoll in
the hiss the scale rub of your whisper snake iris spindle
seething self-touching permutation it’s been a privilege to
abandon my parents but I cannot abandon my parentage.

Let it be said in the dimming light me and my long-nailed
girlfriend do not wear my girlfriend I do not have a girlfriend
romance is the idiom of yank only nominally present in its
pasty pastness and yet I love you, darling just fucking with
dimension now to cantilever the dialectic I am religiously out
of faith and into it with you, so do you trust your pleasure or do
you just know just know how to / how to have it.

Photo: Ted Roeder

Sara Jane Stoner

Sara Jane Stoner is the author of Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), nominated for a Lambda Award in poetry, and the chapbook Grief Hour (Black Warrior Review, 43.2, Spring/Summer 2017); other writing can be found in VIDA (“Failing at Subjects”), the Recluse, La Vague, and Fence, but more often at live readings. She holds an MFA from Indiana University, and is a PhD candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center. She has taught workshops at Poet’s House and Wendy’s Subway, as well as classes at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, the CUNYs, Bard Microcollege Holyoke, and the New England Literature Program through the University of Michigan. From 2014-2017, she served as the Reviews Editor for the Poetry Project Newsletter.