Emma Aylor

Stonefruit Season

Begin with geomancy, that old divination of oldest earth.
The startle of August rain in this city cools a narrow lane
of watered sky at a creep through the window. What makes a grace
makes a kind of cure, a wraithed mercy thickened at the sides
like milk left out in a yellow bowl.
It is not fall yet,
it looks nothing close to fall, but still the wind carries
on thin. Consider interiors. On the grass
of the park I close my eyes to leave trees
drawn as outlines in lidded dark, and little else;
eat a peach, a plum, a nectarine, and leave their light to unroll
flushes down my arms, unroll shine and copper, the stones in a circle
around; put my clothes on backwards and name three things
that do not reflect a face.
The silk of mimosa blossoms smears
the air in oil paint—the tree whose leaves fold like saved papers
to sleep through the night. And I remember
a scar on your arm made of melt and fire, a crater, what’s left
when what’s burning is taken away, and I write a letter, I bury
a letter, I throw a handful of dust down to the dust
and know it says something, but it isn’t for me.

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Emma Aylor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, New Ohio Review, the Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, she lives in Lubbock, Texas and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.