National Poetry Month : Beatrice Szymkowiak,

 

The End of April
                        after “April” by M.S. Merwin

When rain has stopped falling my eyes will go

blind with soundless
salt my hands

fumbling empty air
will crumble

into sand grist scattered

by continuous winds longing
for a lone

drop
of your tears

 

 

 

 

Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines.