Lot of My Sister

Allison Stine

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780873387057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631011481
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This volume presents a collection of poems by Alison Stine.

VINCENT’S EAR

1.

Hear this:

you are the kind of person

to cup your quiet hands around a moth

or slap it

with the flat of your palm as it paddles

toward the bald GE bulb out on the screen porch.

Because I am your hands

and that light,

that hot dumb light,

burning both our flesh and brown wings.

2.

They say it is a simple operation,

a series of three, really,

performed by a doctor in California.

I could come home pale with a souvenir

blue-veined hospital bracelet

and brand new ear,

so new it glistens,

almost better than birth

and twice as perfect

as the other one.

3.

In grade school, my mother was the art lady.

Every Thursday, corseting her frame

into a shrunken, Alice in Wonderland chair,

she ooed with us over Blue Boy, and, to be fair, Pinkie.

I felt Van Gogh and I were soul mates.

I would have given him my good ear.

I looked into his blue-walled room and saw my child bed.

Not his eyes, sunken flint.

Not his head, shaved, flinching at itself.

It was my ear

on his face,

my monstrosity in his beautiful pale swirls.

His wholeness destroyed by his own hand.

Mine, malformed by birth, or earlier still.

My deformity is his masterpiece, yet—

4.

They say it is a simple operation.

One, to cut the skin, drill the hole.

Two, to sculpt the bone, make the mold.

Three, to borrow flesh,

steal from my stomach, the back of my legs, perhaps,

somewhere dark where scars will not be seen.

I have only so much skin to stretch.

What if I give and crumble in

on myself? In the end, my body

betrays me and ruins everything.

5.

Who told the pretty girls?

How do they know, beautiful boys

who practice their cruelty on kick balls and the ugly ones?

I should not have swam in the public pool.

I should not have worn my hair in braids.

It is my fault for warming my face in the wind.

But now they know I am devil marked. I am damaged goods.

I am the tattooed man, the leather-skinned snake girl.

Only the side show will take me now,

and the doctor in California.

6.

What did you think,

in those last few moments of normality,

the cool of unsharpened blade,

a razor, I think,

licking the lines of yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Fields beyond Fields
• Porches
• Clean
• The Ripper’s Bride
• Blood Music
• Vincent‘s Ear
• The Wig
• Rembrandt‘s Mistress
• Half Girl
• Chairs
• Lot of My Sister
• The Magician‘s Wife
• Fall Burning