STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
NICHOLAS MOLBERT
After five years, we let the dark
undress us still. To see each other
unclothed would be a concession.
You in your ragged sleep shirt
with holes at the underarms.
Me in my basketball shorts
dampened by night. Concerned
with covering, I would reach
for a spatula, three-ringed binder—
hell—the tennis racket to shield
the mystery. Not confessing
is our sacrament. I whisper
my letdowns to a screen
no one sits behind. I keep my word.
I keep even my word from you.
They say there is only one rule:
The headlights must recede into the fog.
And if the sun is your headlight?
You are walking, then.
The fog recedes into your headlight.
You recede before sun-up
into a five-step gradient of leafy green
through a drastic temperature drop
past trailhead signage
concerning the etiquette
of dogs and what otherwise may be encountered.
Knobs of root,
knuckled and gnarly.
An anagram carved vertically
into the soft shadeside of a thinnish birch.
The most artisan merchandise of middle summer:
a rug patterned after
the splay of crabgrass at the trail’s end,
which is just far enough
from its beginning so that you, upon finishing,
believe you have traveled farther than you have.
Was it Baxter who said this is the essential attribute of a successful story?
That it must come full circle, then go a smidge farther?
Or was it Glück who said that of poems?
I have said elsewhere in writing to three people
more important than myself that I am unable
to feel poems.
To that they said,
overjoyed, Write more about this! Write more.
To this, I said,
Maybe I want to write about disgrace,
which is a bastardization of a favorite first line
from Hass’s “Faint Music.”
But I have spent so much
time inching toward ascetics,
thinking it would gnaw away
at my stock entitlements of want and need—
wanting somehow for my sound
to alight a connection
with something beautiful,
like aphid and orchid.
And what of their melding?
The marmorated stink bug needs,
after all, leaf to be able to want leaf.
The certain perch of stem will not do
until it is all that is available.
Forgive me for receding into
the blinding gradient of metaphor.
Like others, I could turn on Once,
but many who look like me have
rested too much in nostalgia and memory.
I could turn on O! but
there is already so, so much yearning.
Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in southern Ohio. He is the author of two chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and the forthcoming Cocodrie Elegy. His work has been supported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his MFA, and the University of Cincinnati, where he is currently a doctoral student.
