Stan Sanvel Rubin

Stan Sanvel Rubin’s poems have appeared in numerous US journals such as Agni, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, as well as in Canada, Ireland, and China. Four full-length collections include There. Here. (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize). Recent anthologies are For Love of Orcas; Moving Images: Poems on Film; and Sharing This Delicate Bread. He has lived on the north Olympic Peninsula for twenty years, and writes annual essay reviews of poetry for Water-Stone Review of Hamline University in Minnesota.

Cut

I cut my thumb again
trying to prune a flower
to set in the vase you loved
next to your side of the bed
empty for eight years now
and getting emptier
the way the whole house is,
bloated with unstoppable emptiness.

Filled with missing you
despite getting on with my life.
Whatever that means,
I’m sure it means well,
coming from friends and students
who missed you with me for a time.
But they have their own losses,
their unreclaimable vanishings.

Disbeliever in other worlds, lover of life
as it is lived here and now
among people destined to lose,
where have you gone?
In the childhood story, unfortunate
boy Tubby eats so much his buttons pop,
his swollen body rises into the sadness of air
until he disappears. I am already there.