Ellen Stone

Ellen Stone advises Poetry Club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen’s poems have appeared most recently on Verse Daily and in The Museum of Americana, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Citron Review, Dunes Review, and in the anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. Ellen is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net. Contact Ellen at www.ellenstone.org.

Hawks

On a two-hawk day, the sky flashed
with white underbelly, a gasp of wing
through open trees since the leaves let go.
The air silvered with a small shudder
at such precision. Whatever I was doubting
came near enough to touch, but swooped
upward then by her fluid insistence.
How I had walked brittle through the world,
forgetting feathers, notions of wind drift,
barb and airfoil. What keeps a bird afloat,
what keeps us moving toward tomorrow?
Always shifting view, always from above.