Image: Rebecca Louise Law, a London-based artist who is known for her suspended flower installations, transforming spaces, via @womensart1

Andy Stallings lives in Deerfield, MA, where he teaches English at Deerfield Academy. His second collection with Rescue Press, ‘Paradise,’ will come out in 2018. He has four young children, and coaches cross country running.

Paradise 

As she walked along
the garden path, the violets
and nasturtiums turned
to watch me watch, ashamed.
The gate to the pasture
swung open and the horses
ran clear, sometimes as far as
Old North Road before
someone tracked them down
and walked them back again.
A soft, deniable animal.
Freshwater fish in a fishwater
tank, like fruit kept in its
crisper. This is not what I
had in mind, nor did I have it
in practice. Out the window,
what you hear is the sea, how
the stars unfold when you
start to look at them, like
a strand of conversation
starting up, a new
correspondence. The sound
of the sentence one measure
of life’s abundance. I’d
looked everywhere but there
for a meadow so sweet.

Paradise

These days of breaking
clouds. Traded constraint for
tradition, a different
constraint. I know your
being, your physical skin,
the way air moves with
warmth beyond your cheeks.
Out in the gully we stacked
pinecones in piles, stood aside
by the sword-ferns, waiting
for afternoon shadows
to give us cover. A fish
in the crick, a crack in
the flask. Xed out, eyes
to the shoreline. I woke up
on a square of grass beside
the tennis courts, my friends
nowhere to be found.