If you missed yesterday’s chapbook interview, here are two bonus poems by Margo Taft Stever:

Raven’s Rock
Sleepy Hollow, New York

Ichabod, the Headless
Horseman, rolling hills, the Highlands,
villages where men tarry at the bars,
sleepy towns — Beekmantown, Tarrytown,
but who has heard of three young women
who lost their way in separate incidents
many years apart, who took shelter
at Raven’s Rock and perished in the night?
Who knows why they walked the tree-
frozen road, their fingers burnt with cold?

What is a raven but a bird, a ghost
but a raven bird, and the ghosts of three women
ravenous, waiting at Raven’s Rock
for a single man to pass by,
and did they vent their rage
for ages of wrongness,
for the unrequited, the undone love,
love forced upon them, jealous love
hardening them, these women
by the Hudson now still,
now irrevocably gone?

Three figures in white — snow queens,
their ethereal shrill pitch unbearable,
gesturing, as if the swirling snow,
eddies of snow, snow rivers
could be human, as if something
wholly frozen could be alive.

First published in Connecticut Review and The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012)

 

Drought

A dry spell
shimmers on the page;
heat burns off words.
Useless articles
pile up like trash.
I plow them into hills.
Small silences, words like
“it” and “but” clatter together
in memory of what’s
unexpressed. Reassembled,
they could be bones, meadows,
offerings to the gods.

Here is a mound of bones,
woman with infant.
Her breasts are wilted.
Below bellowing surfaces
that cry out for food,
angular bones
pierce through papery flesh.

The verbs linger longest,
out of alignment, months later,
hardest to forget. They knock together,
lonely for ancient villages,
the specificity of snow.
A thousand times each day
I think of death,
the villages of people
on their knees, sowing
children into rows like seeds.

The mother and child starve.
Leaves on the trees blur
behind their backs.
I stare out of windows
for signs of passing shadows,
but the neighborhood looks the same;
houses set on foundations,
people posing mutely behind closed doors.
The rancid glow of streetlights
colors the road with hollowness,
the line in the middle
almost lost in the glare.

First published in Folio and The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012).