Beatrice Szymkowiak - Cloudlessness

Poet Beatrice Szymkowiak’s stark piece “Cloudlessness” feels as cold and desolate as the imagery it reveals to us. These sparse lines and fragmented stanzas allow a window into a scene windswept and empty, hard and wintry. Time itself feels like the subject of “Cloudlessness”, the slow fracturing of stone beneath eons of ice and thaw, a cloudless sky, an nest devoid of life and warmth. Beatrice told The Dewdrop her recent work, including “Cloudlessness”, explores “new intimacies that result from the disintegration of the web of life”.

Cloudlessness

How you huddle stones
in the emptiness

of a windswept nest
& wait. Winter

will hatch out
of igneous rock

fissured by rain
freezing over

& over again.

Beatrice Szymkowiak

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. Website: https://szymkow9.wixsite.com/bszymkowiak Instragram @OhOldOcean