SOREN STOCKMAN

Skirmanté


It’s dark here. We are all
full of rain here. Hold. Press

moon tonight. Guess.

I see now light
opens our room (what
color?) with its curtain
and you, white clothes. I want

what you say, you to speak, know
here. You night-harvest rocks
your mother buried below
a field in your village, your fingers
trenched, cool wind
turns them over. Past bricks
under the grass (your name
hard in them), your grandmother’s
raspberries, fresh air, yellow
wooden houses, small memorial
statues, people not breathing
but not dead, everything you
carefully dig around. Now

sleep well.
I look for where you live.
It’s dark here, separate here.
We are all full of rain.


  
145 The Paris-American

Soren Stockman was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the First Place winner of the 2013 Narrative 30 Below Story and Poetry Contest, the recipient of fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a Finalist for the 2013 Baltic Writing Residency at Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Narrative, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, St. Petersburg Review, PEN Poetry Series, H.O.W. Journal, Parallax, Scrivener Creative Review, Tiferet Journal, and others. He works as International Poetry Editor for Washington Square Review and Program Coordinator for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania. Stockman is currently an MFA candidate at New York University where he is a Goldwater Fellow. 

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  Next week's poet:

 Ruth Madievsky