Bianca Stone

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks. Her children's book, A Little Called Pauline (Penny Candy Books, 2020), features illustrations based on the Gertrude Stein poem of the same name. She is also a contributing artist for a special edition of Anne Carson's Antigonick. With her husband, the poet Ben Pease, Stone co-edits the small poetry press Monk Books, and with Pease is executive director of The Ruth Stone Foundation, an organization dedicated to the furthering of poetry and the arts and the preserving Ruth Stone's legacy and house in Vermont. Source

Morning Routine

Some days I get up to go for a run

but instead just sit in spandex

and write about the fog.

Is the fog lifting or the trees rising?

Who cares. Nature transfers her blood

into the air. We are her lung cancer.

Her trans fat. Her addiction.

Some days I get up early to write

but instead clean–the great lie

that I am doing something.

The horrible way ketchup keeps, still bright;

beer cans lined up on the porch railing.

It is the end of the summer.

The insects are at their biggest.

They bang and thrum against the screens,

maniacs, giving their last hurrah.

I creep around like Nancy Drew

with my hunch and no real proof.

All things feel preordained, repeated.

My body is numb. Without anticipation.

I sit in the lobby of someone else’s potential

thinking it is my own.

I go about my day

convinced I am immortal.

Published:

2019

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Nature

Poems of the Everyday