This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Ghost Moose by Margo Taft Stever, released by Kattywompus Press in 2019.
Instructions for Burial
Dress her in blood stone and azure silk from Le Printemps. Let blue springs envelope her. Let her grow roots—a tree, pulling water from earth
to bough, branches training leaves; each season—each separate body—each universe smaller— explained and recanted.
On the evening news, scientists gather wearing masks; it is not Halloween. Each holds a variant explanation.
In 2019, Margo Taft Stever’s second full-length collection of poetry, Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press), a 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, and her chapbook, Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press), both appeared. In 2022, her third full-length collection, THE END OF HORSES, will be forthcoming from Broadstone Press. Her four other poetry collections include The Lunatic Ball; The Hudson Line, 2012; Frozen Spring; and Reading the Night Sky. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plume,upstreet, Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day Blackbird, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, Webster Review, and West Branch. She is the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. In 2021, as Adjunct Assistant Professor, she taught Poetry and Bioethics in the Bioethics Department of the Medical School at Case Western Reserve University. She also teaches poetry at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children.
