Stacey Lawrence

Stacey Z Lawrence has a BA in Education, an MAT in English, Speech & Theater & teaches Poetry at a public high school in New Jersey. Her work can be seen in The Comstock Review, Eunoia Review, & others. Her poetry was long & short-listed for Fish Prize in 2019 & 2021 & nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. She is a poet for Writing the Land, Moving Words & the National Association for Poetry Therapy. Her first collection of poems, FALL RISK, was released in August 2021 through Finishing Line Press. She is an avid hiker in the Catskill mountains where she has a writing cottage.

Keeping You

I promised you
that morning in your office, legs resting on a desk
we built from a wooden door etched in
hearts & arrows
ML+SL
pink still in your wink,
you had a few months more,
so now I write
inhaling you poem after poem they come & come like
ticker-tape parades, Rapunzel’s hair, Isadora Duncan’s red scarf
waving underneath your cloud
I wait for rain beneath sun-drenched cumulus
that only pours in echoes.

Fall Risk

Kart I wake
Drunken state
Hair knot funk
Like kid punk
Reek of piss
Band slaps wrist
Doze on gurney
Slow dark journey
Have to sow, have to reap
No time to stop, no time to sleep
So I YANK off these tethers
like our mothers burned their bras
& strut green-gowned
into darkness.

Repair

The shop stems
from a narrow Newark street
where garages cram together like
broken Legos,
we dine with plastic forks on the hood
of a half-painted Subaru
devour pan-seared
scallops, spanish potatoes,
a twisted spine of geranium
leans into the heat,
beer is cold.
I flower a little
when I’m near rotting transmissions
tarnished rims, greasy
men under decaying carriages.
Later,
when all things beautiful
wither
I discover the petals, parched
under a dark window
& lend them sun.