That springtime evening, the Virgo constellation
let go her wheat and blazed a prairie fire across the sky.
We parked inside her streaming, starlit shadows
of the one-room schoolhouse then wandered down
to creek’s edge because it was the end of March
and the bugs had not come on. Smooth stones
hummed warm in the blankets of our palms
before we skimmed them across the water,
slow and deep. We knew you’d sleep
against your fiancé next month and tell him nothing.
Tell him nothing, our hands empty of rock and river
locked together like the singular spread of waves.
Dave Malone is a poet from the Missouri Ozarks. His most recent book is You Know the Ones (Golden Antelope Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in San Pedro River Review, Plainsongs, and Midwest Review. He can be found online at davemalone.net.
