CROWN SHYNESS
The way lodgepole pine trees,
mature and stocked tight,
stunt their growth, crowns dwarfed,
limbs kept small
just to stand apart—
somewhere in the years between us
I stopped loving myself.
Which is to say, I stopped being capable
of loving you: the space between us
a constellation of instinct,
self-destruction, compassion, practice.
Which is to say, it’s taken this to know
that I will curb my outstretched branches—
heart now pitched and sealed as a cone
with sharp-tipped scales, mind a splintered
bough, skin once succulent as inner bark.
Sometimes a good tree decays
from the inside out, which is to say,
our love is rotten, mushrooming
clusters of spongy poison.
The hardest part of knowing this
is knowing this
Sarah Anne Stinnett teaches at Berklee Online and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and an ALM in Dramatic Arts from Harvard University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Plume, Palette Poetry, On the Seawall, The Shore, Summerset Review, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
