Linda Dove

Scheherazade Finishes

In 1,001 Arabian Nights, the storyteller fights for her life
by dreaming up cliffhanger after cliffhanger. She is

trying not to be loved. Each night, she walls herself
off, letting the words take the shape of a body.

And then she is alone with her creation, breathing
in the corner. A little bit of the future rushes in to the void

like tide or bird song or the longing for another life,
where she sleeps in the hulk of pine trees, not palms.

When we get to the end of a story, even a story that saves us,
sometimes we learn that love belongs to the next day.

One voice disappears so something else is just beginning.
It crackles with release, seeds shaped like little swords,

blown to the wind. Discards. Lost to do’s. On the desk,
the list left behind of what must happen soon.

Linda Dove (Poets & Writers) holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet of four books: In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in the hills just east of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University. Her favorite sweet indulgence is unwrapping the cellophane from a tube of Smarties.