Reclamation of the star athlete

Samn Stockwell
Published on December 5, 2019

We embrace him
as machines spin forward our artifacts—
lip balm, ticket stubs.
We think his best effort effortless
before the day spotless
as stainless steel.
 
I am afraid we think
what everyone thinks
about much the same things.
It makes the kings and queens
of our estate lower their heads
and go to bed. We built
the walls around the gardens
and it hardly matters –
we’re nursing our fragments
in the lees of every road.

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

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 and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in Poet-Lore, The Literary Review, and forthcoming in Gargoyle, Plume, and others.

Issue: 
62