Michael Shewmaker


The Wreath

She bound it with her lover’s hair

and nailed it to the beam above her bed.

If asked, she’d have told you it was made

of saxifrage—that you could hear

the creek from where she gathered it—a bud

or two still blooming then. She laid

her lover down beneath it.

In the fire,

they slept beneath it. Who’s to blame?

the preacher said that Sunday. Every bloom

wilts in this weather.

Asked once by her lover,

she told him it was made of flame.


Michael Shewmaker is the author of Leviathan (2023) and Penumbra (2017), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Harvard Review, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.