Today's poem is by Alison Prine

Hush
       

Walking home that day I pressed
my face into the fresh snow

piled on a pine bough
so I could see the print of myself asleep.

I met her at my house. Down
in the basement I put a record on.

I lay beside her on the floor.
I touched her hair.

There in the contours
and shadow we recognized each other.

Our bones nearly grown,
she closed the door.

The taste of cherry chapstick,
the clench, the release.

Upstairs my stepmother's wooden sandals
clicked across the kitchen floor.

The dryer buzzed, then stopped.
The music uncoiled and filled in.

Everything worth doing
is worth being terrified by.

In the static silence she reached out
and dropped the needle to the groove.

That became the refrain
we couldn't turn away from —

like the threshold and the decade
and the nameless thing we'd done.

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Copyright © 2024 Alison Prine All rights reserved
from Loss and Its Antonym
Headmistress Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission