• “Carmen et Error” a Poem by Rosie Stockton

    From the Collection “Fuel”

    “Carmen et Error”

    [ ]

    like cupid I can only shoot
    one arrow at a time
    but I’m practicing comrade,
    I’m full of drafts. entering our
    canopy, blemished and pruned,
    unearthed light stumbles
    through layers of orange
    season’s particulate, having
    never wanted to invade
    anyone’s oblivion, but there
    was no other place.

    we could live here, I think, and we do.
    in this mansion-like fallowed
    field where I see you
    unask why May gloom
    makes the golden air feel
    so fertile and extracted.

    all premeditation, all the ways
    I know harm are legal,
    all this care knows no redress
    from surplussed nematodes that jack
    down the price of how we live
    in this strict orchard whimsy.

    I needed you
    to fortify this need
    with water rights, secure
    applauding clouds of dust,
    invent the clock and clock
    out, enter muffled horizons.

    I needed you exiled
    outside perfection, thickly
    peeled, an Ovidian error I keep
    close to my mirror, dwelling with
    me obscenely, eyes trained on
    that slippery double, the
    reservoir’s chemical fish
    enact their own epic,
    redact the rehearsal
    & bow out.

    ______________________________

    Fuel bookcover

    From “Carmen et Error,” a poem by Rosie Stockton. From the Collection Fuel. Fuel by Rosie Stockton is available from Nightboat Books.


    Rosie Stockton
    Rosie Stockton
    Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021), which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Fuel (Nightboat Books 2025). Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire, and Wonder Press. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.





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