Drum
by Preston Mark Stone
The ones I miss the most I rolled by hand,
packed with moss and damp earth. The paper
crackled quietly between my fingers
as I packed down all those fields, the leaves
of Kentucky and Virginia. The moment
it turned to chocolate gravel in the floor
of my throat, everything became
easy: lying in bed with our twin coils
of smoke rising in the streetlight,
or standing in the shower with one
dry hand, or driving on a winter morning,
one hand on the wheel, the other tipping
the cigarette out the window. I remember
being fifteen, and holding one out a window
as the car charged down the freeway,
and marveling at the rain of sparks
as if this were some sort of bona fide magic,
a true slice of the mysterious held between my fingers
and drawn into my body, where it might grow.
The last one was on a bench in early spring,
forgettable except for being the last, its smell
on my hands rich as the scent of a woman’s hair.
In bed that night, I mourned it, fingers to my face
as it faded away. Goodbye my slightly deadly,
goodbye my nearly precious—
Preston Mark Stone holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was a winter fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives and works in Philadelphia.