Adam et Eve (1909)
BY ERIN STOODLEY
El Camino High School at Ventura College, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors’ List
After a six-month love affair with composer Erik Satie, Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) left him. Satie had developed an obsession with the painter, artist’s model, and former circus acrobat, writing Valadon love letters regarding “her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet.”
He who notes these hands gentle has never
felt the weight of the metal
base of oil she guards against her breast, feet
tiny has never slung his own
blisters upon a trapeze, nude beneath
the heaving fluorescence
in preparation for the fall.
It is inevitable: the apple always picked
by gentle hands, the garden
always trodden by tiny feet.
Let’s revisit the foxtail: the snake in the grass
has the face of a woman.
She slips through the clay roots, scriptures
sin into Eve’s hips.
Now imagine the companion
instead: his loin ivy-strung to conceal God’s
cocked gun, fingers pinched, the muzzle, a threat,
guiding Eve’s wrist to the blood-ripened flesh.
Wheatfield with Crows
BY ERIN STOODLEY
El Camino High School at Ventura College, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors’ List
for Vincent van Gogh
The crows rise, shadows within
the husk of dusk.
Woven through harvested rows, two
drunken boys play Cowboys and Indians,
their father’s gun slung, shouldered.
When the bullet finds its body
in yours, a god longtime lost,
you stare into the wheat and replace
the naked, wind-red faces with the last
flaxen stroke.
The crows have separated
after their sermon. The boys have gone
home to sleep, griefless.
Now, the backdrop of night descends.
You leave the easel beneath
the chestnut tree, the wind slipping
through the bandage of your skin.
When you arrive,
the innkeepers blot your stomach,
between each rib.
Blood dries into paint as they
mistake sacrifice for sin.
