Image: trex skulls, posted at Flickr by Mez Love under a Creative Commons License.

“Girls I cared nothing about lay down,
and down, and loved, as a crow constructs
a tool from another tool, and finds its food.
My lust comes home.“

Is there such a thing as a hook-up poem, your beloved asks?

Of course there is, you say, bidding them closer, reaching for their hem, their startle, their belt buckle, because there’s a poem for everything, and for nothing, and oh, goddess, there are poems for the things Soren Stockman writes about + into in “Lustral”, published at PEN American Center.

This isn’t just a quick fuck in the bathroom stalls sort of hook-up poem, though I promise you those have their shine and gleam, too. This is a hook-up in the existential waiting room of forever, where the beloved waits for the beloved, spending hunger like boatman coins to stave off eager ferrymen. The poet wraps the poem’s structure almost helically about itself, spiralling dense and taut imagery into a locked room of wanting so strong, so dire, it might choke a body – and with that final, gasping breath, the body might thank its bane for a lustful death.

The objects of the poem are few, cleverly chosen to reflect anatomy and concealment: the shining buttons on a girl’s dress; the knocking bones of two skeletons regarding each other; fingers reaching into a willing maw to prise out eternity. In “Lustral”, the body is object, and abject before the terrible throne of what it most needs. The poem feeds itself from a thirst slaked only through this hunt, this waiting, this eventual capture.

You can read “Lustral”, here.

Soren Stockman’s poems have been published at Narrative Magazine, The Iowa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. He is Program Coordinator for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania.