For the Love of Endings
Ben Purkert
Featured on Adroit’s BEST OF: POETRY 2018.
How does it feel to lose your planet, your lover, yourself? Ben Purkert’s debut collection, For the Love of Endings, tests what connects us to this earth and to each other. His brilliantly crafted poems examine “the gap / between the world & how / people paint it: dark, distant, there / for the taking.” He makes us look at our disintegrating world head on and see what we’ve done to it, and what it has done to us.
“The Words I Failed To Be” from For the Love of Endings:
I’ll rip off this Coke label to reveal my love life: the ones I like
enough, the ones I adore but can’t ever close. I’m always
drawn to the frozen-food aisle: is this where I meet my new self,
shuddering inside a box of waffles? Hey, a closeout on ice cream,
maybe I’ll pile up on rocky road? I won’t mince anything:
not the breakup, not hours before, each minute snapping shut
on my wrist. I won’t dwell on what I said, only the words
I failed to be. A watermelon, a half-off watermelon, it’s over:
because I love the seeds, I spit them out.
enough, the ones I adore but can’t ever close. I’m always
drawn to the frozen-food aisle: is this where I meet my new self,
shuddering inside a box of waffles? Hey, a closeout on ice cream,
maybe I’ll pile up on rocky road? I won’t mince anything:
not the breakup, not hours before, each minute snapping shut
on my wrist. I won’t dwell on what I said, only the words
I failed to be. A watermelon, a half-off watermelon, it’s over:
because I love the seeds, I spit them out.
