Liz Ahl | A Stanza Is a Place to Stand

A Stanza Is a Place to Stand: poems by Liz Ahl. Number 3 in our A.V. Christie Series.

[ cover art: Arthur Dove, Snow on Water, 1928 ]

Publication:  December 30, 2023 [100 copies]
27 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-12-9
$ 12.00

Liz Ahl is the author of two full-length collections, A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), and several chapbook-length collections including Home Economics (2016) and Talking About the Weather (2012), both from Seven Kitchens Press, Luck (Pecan Grove Press, 2010) and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. She lives in New Hampshire.

New Year’s Eve Wish at the Hampton Inn, 2021

Here is where I want to stay:
not the literal room, with its familiar
branded comforts, its cool bleached sheets
and small boxed soaps, its mini fridge
and wide-screen television, its double-bolt—

not this room, but the just-now singularity,
the slender space placed like a bookmark
between seconds, the interstate exit between
last year and next, my body a brief stillness
between exhalation and inhalation, breathless

but not yet dead; precarious, present, only here,
only midnight, exclusively this midnight,
the very middle of it, the silence between
chime six and chime seven of the imagined
clock tower, the arrow of Zeno perpetually

suspended in a stillness of travel,
in the narrow, infinite life strung between arrival
and departure, snowed in by the quiet before
the anticipated blizzard, outside of time,
or maybe I mean so deeply inside of it, touched

by it, pressed firmly but gently from all directions
as if I’ve been guided, finally, into the calming embrace
of a Temple Grandin restraint system,
a tender mercy, an insufficient apology in advance
for what comes next, only it never comes.