American Colonial

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.