Chris Kingsley

Pine Trees

Some are more shy
more lonely than others
the ones that wear no
cologne heavy lidded
never looking directly
at you the way they hunch
over and disappear
into the foot traffic of other
pines in the forest until
you can’t tell one
from another until
you’re sure you’ve
lost the one you were
concentrating on
and give up
until one night
you sense it standing
outside your window like
a priest swaddled in a
black cloak of stars in
a silence so deep it sounds
like listening

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Chris Kingsley has been published in Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Little Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Pennsylvania English, Permafrost, POEM, The Quarterly and Rattle among other publications. He holds a BA in literature from Binghamton University. Chris lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and two dogs.