Sam Kerbel

Sam Kerbel was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His first chapbook, Can't Beat the Price (2025), is available from Bottlecap Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Anthropocene, Argyle Literary Magazine, Burningword, Lana Turner, and Libre, among other publications.

---

Leaving the Party

The tavern is social and bushes elsewhere 

Along the dark road past the gas station

In mortal hell, that mortal verb,

Coiled in coupledom:

Forgiveness, that little known fire, 

Reeks from the trees, the shaken surf,

Bearing a pharmaceutical metaphysics.

Our path is switchback, it scabs

Over the dead: exhilaration offers little

By way of consolation, but so too the young,

The million eyes making your company

Crammed like too many cuckoos in one clock

That station wagon hurrying sternward 

Opaque and palmy like a cold mojito.

We may be two lives, gentle and beginning,

Impersonal, much less sordid than summer’s

Eve, when things begin to die, licking their peels

By the open doors of huts left empty

By the train station, along the twilight path:

Our Eden, in fact, is our strength,

Your breath eternally new in mine.

---