THANATOS & EROS

I dislike the dormant period

Green left out of the world

A lisp listening to the hush of growth

I don’t mean a reunion with religion

A feast of folly

I am inside the natural world

And all I see are reflections of forms

In the pond through which geese don’t break the water with small movements

It’s almost a Russian evening with a moon as low as a body

POSTHUMOUSLY,

I study how you talk to me
sometimes through me

the way your hair falls
in obscurity of sunlight

rising out of its massive
bursting light

I study your mouth
one corner
expressing tragedy

another
a steady uprising

Surely happiness
speaks out of your mouth

I can see it all rising
& falling out of you
a mass of something that used to be

DEAD BODIES ARE THEIR LINEAGE

I tell the air,

I tell the air again

I am risk-averse

Dug in at the sight of the mountain’s way in

Outside of blank light

Inside an opening

You’re on the precipice, retreating, trembling

You stripped of our moonlight, tethered to the openness between us

Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Image, Poet Lore, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, Stanford University Press, and Spillway, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly.