Poem of the Week | August 24, 2026

Michael Broek is the author of Refuge/es, winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award for poetry, from Alice James Books, and three chapbooks: The Logic of Yoo, from Beloit Poetry Journal, The Amputation Artist, from ELJ Publications, and most recently The Window Light. He has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Marble House Project, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and three grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

“Stem” by Michael Broek is our Poem of the Week.

***

Stem

There must be a name
for the trauma of walking
into my son’s bedroom
when shirtless he rises from sleep
and the cuts on his arms
his shoulders
resemble war wounds
or the red gashes
of a lash.

Maybe it’s just another name for tired—
stealing his sister’s cash & stash.
Endless walks
to the therapist’s door & him saying
no—not today. Maybe
tomorrow there’ll be a new argument
knowing it’s not—
just more dishes caked with waste

There must be a name
for giving up while also
grasping. This is not some glass
I’d thought I’d hold—
its thin stem, mouth opened
upward like a gull’s beak
swallowing everything, even dark.

Yet, I have some awe
for the scars—the marks some love
leaves when it fails. Still, I’m here
and I’d kiss that skin
though mostly
he’d like me to disappear. That’s okay.

Gulls refuse reason
and fly above the millionaire’s yacht
and fly above the rusted dredge
dawdling in the gray Navesink
not caring that one is a lie—
the other a hurt.

***

Author’s Note:

I’ve written a lot lately about mental illness and its impact on families. This poem title, however, was inspired by a line from Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, which is not about mental illness per se, but about lost hope. Listening to tapes that he records of himself, he realizes after many years that his life of striving has been wasted. The image (or the voice) that he is left with is of a fleeting moment, long ago, when he lay with his love in a small boat: “We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) […] We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.” What he remembers is both the insularity and the necessity of human intimacy, the way that what is experienced together is also experienced alone.

Title image: Green Apples And Champagne Glass (1934), Helene Schjerfbeck