When your body was left among shags of wild crab grass, I loosened my hair and reflected on your hands crossed over your grey wool suit, your tie balancing your heart, your day’s currents, your new silence.    
  
I wondered for awhile, if I’d been viewing the scene through the window of a train.  I saw ordered rows.  Read the sky’s vertigo. Years shining up like eyes through verdigris plains. By morning the sun’s wide desire and the under-wing of a grosbeak greeted indigo streaks of soil. Noon ended the real mind. Still, I think of you as if you might return.  Then I remember that view: autumn’s contractions expelling the last stubborn leaves from the oak, the field dizzy with dusk weather.

—Maureen Alsop

Maureen is the author of Apparition Wren, Mantic, and several chapbooks including Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the dream you spoke, and 12 Greatest Hits,  Nightingale Habit and Origin of Stone.  She is the winner of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Arsenic Lobster, Typo, The Laurel Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, and The Kenyon Review.