Everything I write is a direct reflection of my soul. I turn myself inside out with every single collection of poetry that I put out. I write everyday and I've written many poems since the initial release of this book in 2012. However, this is my favorite published book. And, I think it contains some of my best writing to date.
In this mesmerizing collection, Stacy Stephens invites readers into a world where raw emotion meets unflinching observation. With the precision of a watchmaker and the soul of a wanderer, Stephens crafts poems that illuminate the often overlooked corners of human experience.
From small-town streets lined with "clapboard houses" to conversations held in "Black Cadillacs," these poems traverse the landscape of memory, desire, and quiet desperation. Stephens gives voice to those existing on society's margins—the dreamers, the outcasts, and those suspended between what was and what might have been.
"The Never Girl" captures fleeting moments with startling clarity: a notebook-carrying girl who believes her words "stitch the world together," southern women whispering fantasies in sleepy towns, and the unspoken weight of lives unlived. With influences echoing Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Stephens creates a tapestry of images that linger like "moon beams" unfolding their fingers at dawn.
This collection serves as both mirror and window—reflecting our shared humanity while offering glimpses into worlds we might otherwise never see. Through language both accessible and profound, Stephens reminds us that poetry still holds the power to illuminate truth in an age of uncertainty.
Below you can read a small collection of poetry found within the book. If you enjoy this excerpt, consider PURCHASING MY BOOK!
Where Life Is
We read about life that summer,
And friendship. Words of Anne River Siddons
And Judy Blume jumping from commercial paper
To spiral around us, that atmosphere of lovers and friends.
How we’d cruise library shelves,
Hunting down words like literary vultures.
Pausing upon that big chair in the reading room,
A Buddha, a Shaman, I bent my head in
A silent séance of Melville and Emily Bronte.
Do you remember how love filtered through those trees,
The green, oh that green, miles upon miles
Of trees and wildlife and history, our ancestry?
How it swept into the car windows
Rolled down, and churned itself like butter
Into the music, the sustenance of our souls,
Drawing its life force from the words of Bob Dylan.
Lyrical truth, all the answers were blowing in the wind.
Life that summer was the wind,
You and me, figments of some celestial briar
Snagging onto this Appalachian hillside.
Other worldly, we still found rations for our souls,
Singing in the cicadas call, floating beneath the locust wing,
Burrowing into the earth where worms rot,
Transposing into the egg of the blackbird,
The belly of the ostrich, my purpose was a final conception.
Two silly girls sitting beneath a tree,
Purses full of costume jewelry and wrinkled receipts,
Unwilling to be marketed, unsold, two rarities
In seventies attire and notebooks in our laps,
We were two synonyms for individualism, and it found us there.
Life, it was alive, and we were living it.
Conversing in a Black Cadillac
This is the moment
When everything in my world
Boils down to one car ride.
All the lights of the universe
Were slowly disappearing,
The Gods of the sky
Turning the stars on,
One by one.
You turned to me,
Silhouette boy of night vision
And too much grit between your fingers,
And asked me what was in a poem.
How can one verbalize
That words are a juxtaposition
Of moods, memories, stolen moments
And hidden life streams, inaccessible,
When a strange boy has her knee
Knotted between the crook of his palm,
Kneading the flesh like dough?
This is a sort of moment
When all those unmarked postcards,
The parties you never got invited to,
The presents from friends who never came,
Graduation programs and county fair pamphlets
Twirl down and about like unnecessary graffiti.
Tears, words, impalement of moon girth,
Like little white checks on a chess board,
All the important things I have to say
Stick themselves in the mud,
A playground fort of unshed annihilation.
5 am Unfolding
Once upon a time,
Someone told me that the only thing
That really mattered was kindness,
But somewhere in this universe
Surely there are better things
Than church bells ringing.
And old women gossiping,
A cesspool of love-me-nots,
Bedraggled in what it meant
To worship a fallen starlet,
The bags beneath their eyes,
The inlet of some wonder-woman
Turned street-walker, yes, God is a demise.
And somewhere beneath a tomb,
In some ungodly place, some unholy
City-be-gone like Marrakesh,
a once-born Goddess rots in her bones,
The brown of her flesh falling between
The echo of words she never said.
She lies with the maggots
In a place where when love dies,
It dies alone, it dies forever.
Past the Times
Tonight the plaza side-strip
Is an over-hang of bruised concrete,
A spider-web maze of has-been businesses,
Frayed movie sign, a phantom galloping
Across the wind of this nowhere town.
This is your window into the obsolete,
For even the crows keep fast to their nests,
Nothing stirs, give the townies café debris,
And the forgotten ones in torn rubber soles,
Second-hand metal shopping carts across parking lots,
A side-street swim in the county dumpster.
The is the twisted wheel of civilization,
The suburban metropolis of never-again,
Old men wrapping their spindled fingers
Around wooden canes, and time,
Time is their orange fingernails tapping
Seconds into the night, waiting for tomorrow, waiting to die.
Scientist
At ten years old I was free,
A scientist thing in skinny legs,
Brave in my steps,
I was a soldier at camp
I was camouflage in early morning,
The dew tickling my toes,
And sycamore trees
Passing me, in bare feet.
I was reborn in those hills
Behind my daddy’s house,
Solace was the shrill of a blackbird,
And coal stove smoke singing the air
It’s medieval shapes hanging a picture
In the sky, antagonist acrobat
Souring the purity in it’s bitter pungency,
But I only smelled the pine.
Life was there, sticky in my fingers,
I’d wind my way a trail,
I was the woods and sunlight
Baring her shadows through
Maple trees big enough to drown me,
I was nature, I was new.
I was the black beetle buzzing,
I was sassafras baking in the sun.
For the Almost Lover
I am all here
All one hundred and two pounds
Of roaming indignation,
Sculpted and brushed and painted
To perfection, the art of your eye’s wonder.
Your foot was on my heart,
Your words the jump-start ignition
In those rolling days of winter white,
Where you plucked my tongue
From my mouth and sewed it to your ear.
I was a damsel, and a fool
I was the tight jeans in your center iris,
The Neptune of your wonder lust,
And you were the yesterday clock
Claiming my tomorrow, my pens livelihood.
I was a desk clerk waiting for your call,
You were the insurance broker
That never gave me a second chance,
Selling me pretty words and big dreams,
Stealing part of me, then changing your name.
Yes, I have been that girl
The Cinderella fool in shining eyes,
A keyhole into your world of abstract and silence
The short wired circuit of your drifting dreams,
All fake smiles and ambition at the curtain call.
You said I was a Rubix cube, unsolvable,
In the way I’d sit and speak and never uncover,
Like a secret, like an Egyptian tomb,
I was there, but I was buried too far down for excavation,
And you, well you were the dirt in all my secrets.
Insatiable Urge
You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right. ~Maya Angelou
I’m craving the smell
Of a life I tried to forget…
The beggar on the corner of Main ,
Twigs in his beard and a sentimental hat
Of useless knowledge and a life insignificant.
He asks me for fifty cents and a handshake,
I ask him for the meaning of life, we exchange.
The plaza, pretty girls in wild hair, I have been there
With fading lipstick kisses on a mirror,
Love letters lost in a Bible I never read,
Poems of butterflies and never-ending adoration,
A journal full of my faded has-beens.
The haggled librarian and her bug-spray hair,
Old women with long, yellowed nails,
Intellectuals and fools intertwined alike
In the old library where I used to taint my life
With the lies of words fallen between wrinkled pages.
The smell of pine and summer’s last chill,
Dying down to a celebration in these rolling hills.
Apple Day Festival and it’s cotton candy galore,
Drunkards and red-necks and normality hanging thick,
A carnival, old-timers traveling, the echo of childhood lost.
I’m craving the smell
Of a life I tried to forget.