ZEKE SHOMLER

Velvet

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2024: VOL. 39.

WINNER OF THE 2024 FOLIO POETRY PRIZE

Artfully utilizing a 21st century American form created by Terrence Hayes in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks, the poet builds a scaffolding of found end words that temper the anxieties of a younger man and amplify the urgency of the century we are living through. Within “Velvet” the visceral world of the Anthropocene lives contemporaneously with the ancient: Issa, moose meat, hardening antler, Shakespeare’s “violent delights,” they all soften sonically against the mechanism turning the lines of the poem: “The world of dew is, yes,/a world of dew,/but even so”/. Existence within impermanence. Zeke Shomler’s “Velvet” meets the form, inhabits it, then shuts the poem’s door leaving just a hint of moonlight. This poem is a touchstone I’ll return to. – Majda Gama

a Golden Shovel after Issa

When you are ready, you will scrape the velvet from your antlers. The
hours of scratch and file will be hot and unforgiving; the world
will not be kind to you today. The velvet will hang down like strips of
moose meat drying in the sun, the blood will cling to bone like dew.
What I mean to say is this: the only way to go deep into the forest is
to destroy a part of yourself, to rip away soft flesh and expose, yes,
expose the hardness underneath. Darling of the wet landscape, you are a
paradox of bloody maturation, you renew yourself within the world
of violent delights. This forested valley—this glen—this rock—this is a place of
stomp and clash and urinate and tenderly drink from green leaves the dew
like tears when they drip from the eye. In this forest you see nothing but
hard things to scrape on, to destroy. There is nothing tender here, even
in the leaves as they stir in the wind. Even walking by moonlight it must be so.