for In Your Own Words, a poem by Dave Malone: ‘Only Stars’

In Your Own Words starts September 5

Over at Poetry for Life on Substack we’re reading and journaling and writing from a few of Dave Malone’s poems, in preparation for In Your Own Words, a three-week mini-course I’ll be teaching in September, using Malone’s collection Tornado Drill. Come join us and meet storms with words.

Poems that move me always inspire me to write my own. Here’s one I wrote after journaling through Malone’s love poem “Only Stars.”

Perfect Ten 

Your hands shouldn’t take up so much space.
Your ring, solid enough to cut stone. Not one
errant cuticle. Penultimate thrill –
when your hands take their time.
When they falter – bliss.

Your hands hold my tears, find my forearm
in the night, reach, coax out sound.
Asleep I wait somewhere
where all ten fingers, insistent, spread.

– Megan Willome