“after leaving my husband”
Samn Stockwell
Artist Statement: I think if composition nudges towards the truth of something, it necessarily breaks down what came before.
I’m braided to my son.
Everywhere he goes,
I borrow his eyes.
I’m a slow train
of accounts, where he
surveys the past
I severed for him.
I reconstitute mornings
of sunlit breakfasts,
the breeze under crows
stamping on rooftops, and bowls
of peonies on the tablecloth.
Nothing in my past prepares
this present, the generosity
of an alternate world where we
are the treasure it requires.
Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series (USA) and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in On the Seawall & Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Plume and others. Recently, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem prize, was selected as the editor’s choice at Panoply, and was the editor’s choice for Brain Mill Press.
https://www.samnstockwell.org/
https://www.facebook.com/samn.stockwell.31