At the Yale Gallery of Art by Samn Stockwell

“It’s a hardcover world for papery girls.”

At the Yale Gallery of Art by Samn Stockwell

At the Yale Gallery of Art
The idea of an age done to death –
a room of fat-lipped cherubs
kissing an emaciated Christ.

A better genius creates
the front grill of a Ford, the lawn chair
swallowing a summer, and the filmed fairytale
flickering on the wall –

the vaulted ceiling a conical cap
for the dunces we were.

Cinderella kicks the flaps of ash
around her feet and dreams —

it’s a hardcover world for papery girls
going forward on infinite carpets,
stranded by white fields.

*

Samn Stockwell has been widely published and her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent work has appeared in Mudlark, Salamander and Spillway. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College.