It’s time for another round of Broadside Thirty, our showcase for poems in thirty lines or less by poets thirty or younger. Today, we present a new poem by Soren Stockman.
Goodness
She lies across your legs, open to the open window,
and after promising not to ask,
does not. She tells you to stay, and whatever ruin
may or may not be strewn across her apartment
(ruin a made thing now
both yours and hers to keep) breathes. No after-the-fact
text, more personal than you realize or than either of you
expects, in which, again,
splinters of what you feel together,
this time the underneath of it, show through,
can recompose ruin like this.
Remember, when you knelt before me, with what soft thing
I covered your eyes? And how you kept them closed, when it fell?
Thank goodness. Thank whatever you like.
Soren Stockman’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, PEN Poetry Series, H.O.W. Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, The Paris-American, and Narrative Magazine, which awarded him First Place in the 2013 Narrative 30 Below Story and Poetry Contest. He works as Program Coordinator for Summer Literary Seminars, and lives in New York.