Written by: Cuin Reagan
Third Place Winner of the 2026 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest
Something hangs
In the foyer, in the stained-glass solder—
Its lead seeps from the florid panes
Into tepid pipe water
My pale daughter
Would bathe in—if I had one—
And the carpeted stairs bleed
With colonial copper
In turquoise ringlets, a watercolor,
Gangrenous as a silver ring’s
Entrails on my little finger—
Mahogany, ornate, proper—
Unbidden runoff ensues in
Aesthetic inflation—
Weary art betrays nations
Maybe staving off tyranny
And public hangings—
Consider a hydrangea-faced diaspora—
That of a displaced and evermore
Erring westerner,
Of an eager poet and heartsore settler—
Because I’m not unlike the cobalt glow
Of a cathedral glass window,
Gelling the landward light
Into dapples of cash crop indigo
On floorboards far older
Than the structure as a whole—
Native poplar stood centuries,
Sacred bridge and sentry to
The horizon—a border, really,
Between terrestrial and heavenly bodies—
How long, you say, might this country
Linger in heated polarity,
In a milieu of vitriol
And vulgarity?
We’re like the fluted columns
On that brick portico,
Coated in a pretty mortar—
Like the beach sand and potash,
We’re each a molten grain of color
Estranged by leaden veins,
Resigned to our respective
Homesicknesses—
And we let ourselves anneal
Into noxious lenses,
A durable thing
Bordering hate.
