Nomi Stone

on freezing my eggs

The egg is skinned in water, born before
the body. Salt as a nut, bare with blood,
the shallows pink with ache: be arable,
bear me towards the water, let me have
you. I freeze you: cell-throb & wake me
inside the afterlife. On that day, death did
come as a white ram. Egg, we slit its throat.

driving out of the woods to the motel

For your second job, you’re a parking attendant or a poultry process worker: stun and kill them, trim them and cut into portions, bone and weigh, and grade them. You’re a hotel maid. If an American soldier stays in the room you clean, you will fold his uniform as crisply as love, a message that you too call it a liberation. Your brother calls it an occupation, tells you: do not become American. Brother, the sanctions: 2 kilos sugar 3 rice 1 oil 9 flour parsed into sections? Buy lipstick at the drug store. Watch Ramadan soaps. Number your hungers. Braise the bird until it is gold with lemon. Unstring the wish:

bone bone liberation,
one bone occupation.

Nomi Stone's "On Freezing My Eggs" and "Driving Out of the Woods to the Motel" can be read in the print edition of The Arkansas International 4.

Nomi Stone's second collection of poems, Kill Class, is forthcoming from
Tupelo Press in 2019. Poems appear recently or will soon in The New
Republic, The New England Review, Tin House, Bettering American Poetry
2017, Best American Poetry 2016, Guernica, and widely elsewhere. Kill Class
is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in
mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America.