This painful stone
tooth has nothing to grind
against but sky.
All your panicky
rage is coffined,
it’s tamped in,
deeper than I am
tall. Nothing to fear
now but the poison’s
own loneliness,
standing here,
saying its charm,
as if to defend
you now. As if your first
little red scream
when nobody came
to offer the breast
were stopped, and pardoned.
Edison Dupree’s collection Prosthesis appeared in the Bluestem Award series in 1994. He’s also published two chapbooks: Boy With a Ball (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and A Rapid Transit (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1988). His new work has appeared in Southern Poetry Review and in Ploughshares. He’s a native of North Carolina, but has lived for many years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he recently retired from working as a university library assistant.