Listen to us whispering in the morning
standing uneasily among our tools,
the sun clotted on steel and
are we abandoned here?

We hunt until our eyes dim –
the heavy canvas of our jeans tearing as
we go digging under foothills,
dust on our eyelids,
hands cramped in a spasm.
We find something so large
it can’t be carried or thrown away.

We ascend with our arms around each
other, and stop to swim
by a trestle bridge. The sickest of us
needs a long time to enter the water
but we’re patient, we have our arms out
and we saved the last of the oranges.

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series (USA) and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in On the Seawall & Sugar House Review and are forthcoming in Plume and others.