Lust Series (4)
by Stephanie Dickinson

On a dirt road in their love she feels the deer run. Moon glazes them, dazes grape arbor and pelt. He devours her just as she consumes him. Owls hoot, iced in billion-year-old light. The dark is a gourmand. It fingers the red maple’s coarsely-toothed pubis. Licks the sycamore and tulip, swallows the bee winds. On a dirt road after their love, pumpkins bloat the fields between corn shocks, dogwoods gnaw their eyes. Then they hide.

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and now New York. Her work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others. Along with Rob Cook, she publishes and edits the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her novel Half Girl, recently published by Spuyten Duyvil, won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” appears in Best American 2005 Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. Rain Mountain Press has recently released her short story collection, Road of Five Churches, and she is a 2006 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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