Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
To Utopia
The black car floats down the empty street
turning, at the end, into a non-existent city.
A woman in a blue polka-dot dress
drinks ginger ale outside a café, sweat forming
under her breasts. In the café, on round tables,
paper and pencils move with little assistance to the right words.
The furniture shop spills with sawdust as the carpenter makes free chairs.
Around and around the block on Sunday afternoon, everyone is playingcheckers.
Satisfaction is on the face of the deepest thinker.
Hookers perform a labor of love with tender
accountants from New Jersey. Drug dealers
lower the temperature of pain from hotel to high rise.
Whoever has been bound and silenced
speaks now without bitterness.
A couple reaches across
the years that divide them, their hands forming a bridge
for tired immigrants and abandoned children.
No one finds it a tribulation to a human.
Houdini, underwater, dreams of this
as he slips one shoulder, then a leg, from chains.
It sustains him as he moves to the surface.
Samn Stockwell lives in Marshfield, Vermont. She has published poetry in Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and The New Yorker. She is the author of two poetry collections: Theater of Animals, which won the National Poetry Series, and Recital, winner of the Editor’s Prize at Elixir Press. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has taught for many years at the Community College of Vermont. She also works at the Family Center of Washington County. (updated 12/2011)