Tuesday poem #583 : Beatrice Szymkowiak : The Crossing

 

 

Your buttterfly headdress stills, our bodies
lie on the asphalt, hunger

for bulge or crevices, roots,
a scutter of hooves across chests.

So does the carnival end, its unrequited life
lingering in the marrow

like a swallow after dark. You sigh

night & satellites swarm around lampposts.
The moon drops,

stirs an empty parking lot, a wolf’s howl
mangles into an oil puddle.

 

 

 

Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan