Stella Reed

Le Grisette, Paris 1888

He sends me his ear in a box
wrapped in blood stained paper
a decapitated lily, deaf to my horror.
Fine red hairs sprout just above the lobe
like a pubescent upper lip.

Nights in his stuffy flat,
air thick with pipe smoke
stained Japanese prints
hung haphazardly on walls,
I held him and sang
to this ear, my lips,
my breath near enough
to tickle the freckled skin
and his hands like rusted wire
wound through my hair.

Fox-faced god
who I made myself beautiful for,
he said the holy spirit is in everything.
I search for it in this piece
of lifeless flesh.
Whose reflection is that
in the waxen sheen? Whose thumbprint
in the crusted blood?
My tongue finds iron and turpentine
on this strange offering.
White slice of Eucharist,
pale wounded star.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Stella Reed (she/her) is the co-author of the AZ-NM Book Award winning, We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, from 3: A Taos Press. She is the winner of Jacar Press Chapbook Prize for Myth from the field where the fox runs with its tail on fire and the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. You can find her work in various journals and anthologies throughout the U.S., in Ireland and Australia including Terrain, The Baltimore Review and SWWIM. She holds an MFA from New England College. Stella is a labor activist and a poetry teacher for several communities including homeless and domestic violence shelters and Title 1 public school students.