JUST THEIR TIME
by Bianca Stone
I arrived outside--
all the baby goats had been slaughtered
impaled on pikes through the anus and out the mouth
laid neatly in a row in the back of a white truck.
The young couple, the cheese-makers, walked by
smiling, arm in arm, the sun shining around their faces.
Yes, it was “just their time,” they laughed.
Silver air in which more light lies
outside of history, how white the hair
around the mouth was, the stillness of the white
truck, the red insides—I paused above the frozen
mouths, where once the fractions of true events occurred
having begun elsewhere, no more
and the stillness
felt like something achieved. I watched
in idle scrutiny the world be world.
About the author
Bianca Stone author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.