Alison Woods

Johnson’s Pond, VT

A summer porch party
moves to the edge of a field,
a hive of bodies, a bonfire,
pond-cold ale. Some are

stripping now, clothes fall
to the ground. A dark-eyed
boy sways his ass in a slow
striptease, they’re howling,

and you, distant observer,
long to rewrite this, shed
your clothes and while you’re at it,
the meaning of hesitation,

you who comb your hair
thinking of God as the hot sun.
Slip off your sundress.
Stand naked as Eve, modesty offset

by the serpent circling your ankle.
The sly snake says stay.
The sinners watch from a distance.
You enter the pond.


Between Heaven and Sparta

The nurses have found us here, safe
as Zeus was when they placed him in a cradle
to hang from the branches of a tree.

There is always something approaching,
even when we have just arrived, a pile of shoes
at the door. It is dark. I could write of loss

but suddenly there is only accumulation,
a light snow tumbling. Always something
belonging to a river rushing away.

Late September, frost on the cornucopia.
The nurses brush our foreheads with pink,
waxy lips. Love, we are nestled in the crook

of God's bent arm. It is a boomerang,
he'll set us sailing.


Ever After

Across the rippling of the pond in Central Park
a model boat floats in its own oily shadow,
tilled white wing skimming the water.

Oh this voyage! A lifetime
to ask what love is, the good
questions a fragrance filling the air.

I know there are moments
mired and unreachable,
but then some pleasure, like dawn,

slips out from behind the curtain.


About the Author

Alison Woods full-length collection of poems, Bless This Home, was published by Finishing Line Press (2020). Her chapbook, New Forest, won The New Woman’s Voices Prize in Poetry, Finishing Line Press (2011). Woods grew up in New York City and studied with Robert Olen Butler at McNeese State University, in Lake Charles, LA, Allen Ginsberg, and Lew Asekoff at Brooklyn College, NY, and then Lucille Clifton, Richard Howard, Alfred Corn, Alice Quinn, and Lucie Brock-Broido, at Columbia University, NY where she received a Master’s of Fine Arts in 1992. She has been published in many journals and literary publications including The Paris Review, The National Poetry Review, and Chronogram.

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