"Genre" by Samn Stockwell

Travelogue

I have been to Idaho, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Unlike Utah, with its starched,

bunchy mesas and salt flats. When I was in Campiglia-Marittima, the neighbor was pruning his

pomegranate tree, and every night we walked to the restaurant in the piazza and sat outdoors

drinking white wine and eating pasta. We weren’t worried. We were only buried there for a

while. The olives were excellent.

I never go anywhere, I whine, and brush the hand of whoever sits next to me. Isn’t it a marvel,

the things we retain and the things that cannot sink into us? I mean I am not adventurous, I skim

through cavalcades of the ocean.

Adventure

At the same time Whitman was having the lumps on his head read by a phrenologist,

Peary was alive and dreaming of the Artic. His mother considered him delicate and made him

wear a sunbonnet.

Out in Greenland somewhere is Cook’s chest, containing the maps and proofs of his journey. It’s

not that the truth gets lost but it sails on ice floes. Emily Dickinson in her bathysphere continues

searching. For everyone smiling, there’s one forever lost amid the rigging of an untried ship.

Biography

When she wasn’t self-conscious about her false teeth, when the ducks in the pond swam to her

feet, when she painted a village scene from a town she hated, when she was elevated above

washing dishes and changing diapers, when she imagined the lights in the city were on to greet

her, she ate butter brickle ice cream, the story ended happily or never ended -- when there was a

failure everyone washed their hands because it was right to do so. She gathered a cat in her arms,

it was her mother’s when the air was full of spoons and burdocks were green.

Of Certainty, an essay

I am almost certain Amy’s hair is up and she’s squinting and the dog has taken the empty beer

bottle to her water bowl. I am almost certain I will forget Jessica’s name again and call her

Eileen, which she would be if she moved to the city and got a tattoo. I am almost certain I will

get the right gift for my sister’s birthday. I am almost certain I will have a birthday. My wife is

annoyed by the large wet dog on the sofa. The cataracts grow leisurely across my eyes. I will

look at people frown in concentration and wish I had that. I will take out some sewing and

needlework, neither of which I do. I am almost certain I don’t have a black vest or it would be

too big.

Science fiction

She was the genetically enhanced older sister of a clutch of Polish chickens – at a loss for small

talk in the coop. She brought a book with her when she visited from Pennsylvania, where I think

I haven’t been published ever. She couldn’t tear down the coops because chickens are

domesticated – it’s not better to be free in the mouth of a coyote. You knew that. She knew that.

But if she had hands instead of wings.

Sentimental Memory

In the rabbity lands where I grew up, everyone knew what was poisonous. Similarly, delight was

held in common. At least, from a child’s perspective. The arguments were the sizzling ropes of

belts across the backs of children. Every summer we ate lobster on granite cliffs above the shore.

It sickened me but amused my parents.

I won’t know what it’s like to weld tractors together or ski in the Olympics. I won’t know what

it’s like to have an interest-bearing account. Anyway, we were gathered by the waters of the

Black Sea, and we knew salted fish, clothes drying in a hot breeze, and how sweet an orange is

when eaten in the shade. At the bottom of clear water was a gray car -- there so long even my

grandparents couldn’t remember a time when it was new.

Samn Stockwell has published extensively. Her new book "Musical Figures" is published by Thirty West Publishing House. Previous books won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir. Recent poems are in Pleiades and others.