Refusing Endtimes
Won’t you hold me in this June heat, dry & spare? It takes away
the dead skin on the body. They say the scientist buried the centrifuge
in the garden, while the clouds fall into our hands in flakes, smitten
with the sun & plutonium breaks into a three-part god. The fire-
hydrant in Brooklyn makes a fountain over the children’s hands. They fill
their apple juice bottles over the lit sidewalk.
Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. She is also the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and was a Creative Writing Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, The Best Emerging Poets 2014-15, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and 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.