Stephanie Jones

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What Marks Us

You court
small truths
that gather to bear
witness. Light
headed you peel
recent days
unhealed wounds
to find a point of
gripping.

A gauzy memory
unspun silk
so loosened to the
touch it can’t
be real. You rub it
between your fingers
press it to your
unsteady chest
so it reforms
vivid and
contoured: a

torn stocking
and soft
bite of black
licorice. Anise
blooming between
your mouths. You
hold your emptiness
so it tightens.

Behind it
a sweetness whose
sensation rises from
your teeth. Rises
like a rogue wave
headed for a
crowded shoreline.
Below it
patterns of white tile 
and a fallen sky
dreamlit and
red with blood.

Stephanie Jones has bylines in The New York Times, DownBeat, NPR, HuffPost & elsewhere. Her poems appear/are forthcoming in Four Tulips, Querencia Press, New Feathers Anthology, Eye to the Telescope, Entre: Magazine of the Arts, Crow & Cross Keys, Encyclopedia Prismatica, Nulla, t’ART Magazine, Scribeworth, Pictura Journal, Troublemaker Firestarter, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Cosmic Daffodil, Pine Hills Review, Reverie Magazine, 4LPH4NUM3R1C & elsewhere, and as a commission for Blue Note Records.