SM Stubbs
I don’t know how to prepare
thread with silver and wax to sew
together anyone’s torn limbs
and I don’t know how much salt
to heap at the door to leach
poison from their stung feet
and though I’ve heard there’s a well
beneath the city where healers
fill urns with what blesses my throat
I don’t know how to find it
and I do not want to leap
from a burnt, scorched roof
into the East River to become
another miracle, another martyr
of last-second timing and I know
we need you, goddess of assemblage,
mistress of patches and shears
so please give us the help we ask for
in this dire hour and we will sing
your song until no more voices sound
against what’s left of the world.
***
SM Stubbs helps run a bar in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. Winner of the 2019 Rose Warner Poetry Prize from The Freshwater Review, he was also the runner-up in both the Atticus Review Poetry Contest 2019 and the Cagibi 2019 Macaron Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Normal School, Puerto del Sol, The Pinch, Cherry Tree, Carolina Quarterly, The Bookends Review, among others, with work forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review and New Ohio Review.