Maya Pindyck's book of poems, Friend Among Stones, won the Many Voices Project Award and was published by New Rivers Press.  She is also the author of the chapbook, Locket, Master, recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (2006).  Her work has been published in The Sycamore Review, Mississippi Review, Bellingham Review, and Ekleksographia, among others.  Alongside writing poetry, Pindyck makes visual art and co-founded Project Voice, a growing compilation of personal abortion stories that aims to deflate the abortion stigma.  She teaches in the NYC public school system.

Purchase Friend Among Stones.

The Lesson

A certain bird used to make the wrong sound.
Her keeper cried, Go lower, lower—your pitch
feels uncontained.  The bird pressed her beak
to the keeper’s cheek, puncturing his flesh
until a spot no bigger than an ant’s abdomen,
no bigger than the period concluding his command,
appeared.  The keeper mistook the act for kindness
and crooned, My love, my infant—try again.
      

 
Tin (Please) 

On the elm-lined block
hides the yard in which my father planted tulips and basil
side by side, and built, stone by stone, a climbing path.
I learned that when there is pain, one often has the advantage of sympathy
 (and Coca-Cola), but, somehow, there is nothing worse.

You
are darker and poorer than I.  Your hands splinter, feet swell, your anger
ignites a dead tree, and in doing so both blackens and blanches
its branches.  (Is there a difference?)  I ought to address
my own people.  Help me find them.

Pellucid

O no thing at once

hummed clear of all things—

O

single thought within a circle

in which you are the circle

drawn black 

on Rosapina—

Make sure the room has been considered

and the basket rim 

and the rice cake

laughing in the light