By Maureen Alsop

Face down, though there was no space, something in you lay and would not get up. You remembered standing in front of the mirror, her future ghost paralleled your eyes. Lean you seemed. And to be looking past.

Slightly imagined bells distracted the breeze. Remnants, your dress of threadbare sepals. Her fingers fidget briefly with a rope. Nothing shy between you now. The precise cold of language became the measure. Rooms emerged. Animal names pulled from song.

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of two full collections of poetry, Mantic, and Apparition Wren, and several chapbooks. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming at TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, ditch, Meanjin, Baltimore Review, and Verse Daily.