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By Samuel Piccone

Issue 36 • Fall 2017 • Poetry

3rd Place Poetry

2017 Summer Contest

The rumbling control of this poem is as fascinating as what lurks underneath. By exploring the fracturing interiority of marriage and domesticity against the violent exteriority of the natural world, we see the frightening overlaps of loss and desire. Here we find that sometimes what most wounds us is within ourselves, our unsettling capacity for suffering; our willingness to settle.
– Safiya Sinclair

Every sound that wakes us we call settling:
lumber shaking its last tremors of the forest,
the rabbit pups whimpering in the garden,
fox-killed one by one until there’s nothing
but a trampled burrow, piles of shedding.
These first nights are all about adjustment,
recognizing the empty stillness as something
we’re supposed to fill with our own creation.
It’s normal for newlyweds to feel farthest
from each other when suffering to be close.
We could pretend we’re teenagers in a house
that we broke into, the bottle of rum swiped
from a father’s liquor cabinet, our nakedness
the only important thing. But at some
point, finding a place to start stops being
the problem. Look at the wedding bands
we bought, the must-have inlay of petrified
rosewood. The salesman said it was all the
rage, natural is in. We thought we wouldn’t
care how they creak a little when we spin
them on our fingers. We call that settling too.

Samuel Piccone

Samuel Piccone received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including, The Southeast Review, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, and The Minnesota Review. He serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review, and currently resides and teaches in Nevada.