Waiting for Happiness by Nomi Stone
Waiting for Happiness
Nomi StoneDog knows when friend will come home
because each hour friend’s smell pales,
air paring down the good smell
with its little diamond. It means I miss you
O I miss you, how hard it is to wait
for my happiness, and how good when
it arrives. Here we are in our bodies,
ripe as avocados, softer, brightening
with latencies like a hot, blue core
of electricity: our ankles knotted to our
calves by a thread, womb sparking
with watermelon seeds we swallowed
as children, the heart again badly hurt, trying
and failing. But it is almost five says
the dog. It is almost five.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Tin House, Summer, 2018.
ABOUT NOMI STONE
Nomi Stone is the author of the poetry collections Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly Books, 2008). She earned an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford University and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. A former Fulbright scholar in creative writing in Tunisia, she has received poetry fellowships and grants from the Vermont Studio Center and the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, and she has won a Pushcart Prize…. (more)
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ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: waiting • longing • joy • Or browse the index
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