“Bending Moment”: a Poem by Joannie Stangeland

Raven Chronicles Literary Press nominated 6 poems & prose works for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, XLIV Edition. This is one of the nominated pieces:

Bending Moment

Here I wear another year
like a ring inside a tree.
Middle of the island
where the creek runs wide,
a poplar leans a little more.
Winded and rain-freed,
it lowers like a supplicant,
an ordinary man,
returning from his mending
journey to the outer fences
and back below cloud wisps,
a break, the cataclysm of stars
reeling, his boots dew-swept
on the track across the gusts
and up the three wood stairs,
walks into the kitchen,
unaccustomed to the sudden
warmth and simmer, sets his hat
on the table, strips off
his woolen gloves, and steps
inside his lover’s arms,
lets his body into that
peach and iron, hands and hair
where it parts, the ear
against his cheek and then breath
as though it is the center
of gravity’s long, sure pull
the way the tree falls
toward the earth it has known.

–Joannie Stangeland

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Joannie Stangeland is the author of The Scene You See, In Both Hands, and Into the Rumored Spring, all from Ravenna Press, as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Joannie is currently in the MFA program at Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.

Published in Raven Chronicles Last Call, Vol. 26, 1918.