sam kerbel – 5 poems

Mass for Lonelyhearts

We look for heroes out of everyday people
We who are not heroes but creatures
Surrounded by legged things 
And their legs carry them if they work 
If they don’t, they find another way
And if it isn’t legs it’s the soul or the mind
Or humpbacked hills bobbing for waves
In an amber field of frequency
And you wonder when paradise will come
What is the ego but something 
To let go of, for the weather to change 
Chipping away at the excess block
Of paradise to find the right paradise 
A paradise not in the mind but felt
In the legs as you find your way
To a town that welcomes you
Welcome to Paradise
It feeds you too
Pink-hued fish from the Cinque Terre move
Like Hell to see you, the enemy 
Of the good is not evil but cheapness
Or evil resigned
It begs of you to just be fine 
With what we’ve called a paradise 
It carries on just fine
Without legs 


My My

It was a fun and funny night
The bunnies skirt by in domme attire  
Humped upon by Mr. Busyman
So taken with the goddesses

Jumping out of California pools
The whole mile down to the glass
Mall, so taken with the sun
Go out there and get the jelly beans

It’s funny at night, it once was fun
And that funniness is fuzzy 
Which is to say, radiator-kind 
A not quite nemesis more destined

To be lover than friend
We’ll stick with the old fonts please  
But never mind, it’s now Nevada
And there’s nothing there

And every light crumbles into cactus 
And our car bursts in this desert night
No flame on record has ever
Been so consumed so fast


Sonnet for a New Year

That numb puddle of delight 
Turns to moss at the earth’s base
Our meditations are just as intimate

If all that conversation carries 
Is the weight of a feud not yet known 
Spoken through living room vocabulary 
Or lake-bound idiom 

A sort of senseless holding onto 
When the land is set to break not
Three weeks into the new millennium 

What can it be said to have anyway?
You’re powerless to let it die
Unless you do it your way 
That early sun is waiting 


Plum Tragedy

Push past the peacocks and heavy brass doors
The silver stream, the blushing martyrs,
Who has come? A drowsy globe 
Its angelic arsenal of shadow 
Know no fashion to hang a hat on 
Faunal fluff uncurtained by interiors 
Quiet in their melancholic palace of exchange
Wound deep into the iced over ponds
A trick of the light in the window make wave

There is something to be said for going home
In a land whose world is private unto itself
There is no going home, just waking up
And all the worlds gone long before
“Created and destroyed, created and destroyed”
Until? One drop of dew pleasing 
Enough to the glassy eye of some body
Whose bedside fire is our galaxy

I dream of Lady Guggenheim
Mounting and unmounting her purple steps
And a house still lived in 
Whose meaning has been ascribed to the greater good
Her gown is full, her attention light,
And a hand-picked general, breaking with scholars, 
Places a hundred-year peace on the board 
With all her idle grace, her hand gloved white
Lurch, slump, time is no less susceptible
The pink light of February shuts the page closed
But leaves on a light for the affair—
How far must he fall before the silence ends
Upon white Arcadian anemones, beautiful demoiselles? 

Tongues unseasoned and serene
Suggest a further down road wintering alone 
By the Atlantic’s edge. There one can find 
All kinds of nice things 
Obscure flickers of the mind 
Neither flame nor shade can adumbrate
A few landscapes and midcentury lamps
Jostle in the back for a slanted view
Of the coming horizon, clear through the road
As seen from our gliding glass hearth
Chatter from the back proceeds unscalable 
To rumor, hymn, spirit,
Our chariot fleeing the dark grass of early spring 
For blazing shore, mere miles from stars
Scanning the earth beneath for survivors

This wreathed province, literal to the point
Of illiteracy, still knows a word from the wall.
Therein lies the tender trap
Exalted in all assumption, kin to golden kind.
A grand portrait of the Lady’s burial misplaces
The crowd nearer to field than temple
Which she approves of heartedly, swells with a pause
Of breath, shaking and shedding her tail in the rain
Maimonides, imp of Al-Andalus, affirms 
This gesture: Amalek too was made an offer
Which was refused


The Lord’s Bride

One must respect the lady, a gentle delirium
Flocks like gold upon her shining lids
Now it’s said she’s as smooth as a sun-chair
The glass shade behind a house at noon
Some say her skin is a rich bullion
This is no way to speak of the bride
Her canopy is broad with myrtle and teasel lest
The vested broker sigh into sermon…
Speak well of them

“Matrimony is our final testament”
Vows pewed to holy contract cause not
A little consternation, a widowed
Usher digs and sulks drawing Christ with his collar
Silk cries echo from beyond their chamber
Who remains? Martyrs for love
Who’s left? Cousins of virtue, friends of vice
A golden gavel long dispersed
The crowd yet dawn together 
Is no less luminous
The bathroom mirror is foxy 
And vast but heavily fogged
By a familiar choir

From dim dawn to gold-limbed morning
Every bar is quiet, nobody eats
He calls to her but her voice sounds like other people
Her kiss must be soft as tobacco
The usher sleeps in a densely shaded cafe
Darkened by skyscrapers and banks
Where, true to the weather, songs die in air
Hurry, thin-lipped night advances, the park
Bed requires no tuning or turning up
Dress your autumn love in silver 
Better to parry the sores of people, those
Who live and those living among
It’s the city! Don’t knock, just walk in
We’re too close not to know


SAM KERBEL was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His first chapbook, Can't Beat the Price (2025), is available from Bottlecap Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Anthropocene, Apocalypse Confidential, Cleaver, Gorko Gazette, Lana Turner, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among other publications. "The Lord's Bride" appeared originally in "Don't Submit."


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