Does This Have a Happy Ending?
News doom keeps coming and coming,
a step forward this way, really just a halt
to the advancing tide of oligarchy, restraint
that lasts a minute, then on again going.
The people know fear and anger. Is this
over-crowding, not enough food, the beginning
of end? Does this poet need to reach out to the grace
of the sun on a cedar deck, the piffle breeze that
stirs the feather grass, the little dog who pants
for some kind word and cold water?
Is this enough, a sunflower’s red bloom on a stalk
over three feet tall that still reaches? The flicker’s
insistent tap on the rotting alder for the black and white
borers? Is this enough for a happy ending?
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Open Mike
I trust women to speak up, not as chorus;
one by one. Strip to skin or leave the velvet on.
Slip inside the purr, beside harangue,
under silence, let stories spill.
I’ve overheard old voices narrating floods and dust,
lilies and hunger. I don’t push them away
even if it’s nothing to do with me.
I need to hear. Tell me what happened.
An angry neighbor tore bits of your hair out.
The man you thought you loved cheated
more than once. The fence wasn’t high enough.
My voice spasms with age. On the phone
people accuse me of breaking up.
I own that’s it’s me. Listeners, lean in.
I’ll use a mike.
When I slipped running away from a man,
I wrenched my ankle. Badly.
Until I didn’t, I loved sex.
I chugged ouzo by a campfire in dry wilderness
and for a week saw the Milky Way.
My one-night cereus bloomed
when I hung out in Las Vegas.
I thirsted for a friend. I ate crow.
My worst boss issued orders from bars at noon.
Unfinished stories nestle in silence I hold
beneath the crackle, cackle-like gravel
of a voice yearning to repaint
yesterday’s astonishing mask.
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Tricia Knoll’s poetry is widely published in journals – from New Verse News to Kenyon Review. Her nine published books of poetry include two that came out in 2024: Wild Apples and The Unknown Daughter. How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. She is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 