Fading Hours
for those never known
Warmed somehow from the inside by a cloak of frost
I would blink you into being if I could.
A purple lipped delusion
appears in doorways so it can vanish.
You flicker in corners of my mind when I remember,
as though you’re a memory, too.
Our sky is a liquid lantern. Above me
cirrus dunes slope and wash with twilight.
Each step presses me into the wind.
Baptized again by cold. By stars that know
my stride. By phases of numbness:
in stinging, in buzzing, in nothing.
I part my lips to drink the end moments
of dusk. To taste and harbor such pureness,
molecular velvet. What I swallow is cold and cracked
but softened by the warmth of a membrane.
Nothing about you can be familiar
but I’ve felt you in your distance. Even now
the promise of you widens my eyes
in the shadow cast by a sudden floodlight.
From between my lips, airy ectoplasm
escapes. Dissolves.
Not even glinting angles of your ghost
appear before me. Only leaves
turning brittle boned summersaults
across an empty street.
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Stephanie Jones is a writer & poet with bylines in The New York Times, DownBeat, NPR: Music, JazzTimes and The Detroit Free Press. Her poems appear in New Reader Magazine, Poetic Sun, 50-Word Stories & Stone Poetry Journal (now Stone Poetry Quarterly), and as a commission for Blue Note Records. She has taught at The New School and has served as the editorial & copy consultant for Jazz at Lincoln Center. A Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated from Wellesley College and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from The City College of New York where she graduated Summa Cum Laude.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 