Apples sweeten in the dark.

     –Eavan Boland

I know she doesn’t mean

just any dark—the one breathing

even now beneath the trees

in the backyard, the one that

holds me in my sleep, the one

I think of when I say it’s getting dark

out there. I know she means

a darkness with a name. One

with intention, one colluding

with historical forces that likely

mean me harm, that are trying

to turn me into less

of a person. Not the sun going down

for seven hours, but for years;

unthinkable violence just another

row in the spreadsheet; every day

being grateful the air wasn’t poison,

that my children weren’t shot

in the head. She doesn’t mean

night,

          but lately I need to read it

that way. Need to hit restart

on my Earthliness. Here, look, b

asic miracles: oxygen; the ocean;

the lunge-feeding of baleen whales;

the compound eye; seeds.

                                         Apples

sweeten in the dark, I murmur

in January, when apples have been

eaten roughly off the map,

their branches snapped

and frost-beaten; when the dark

goes on for fifteen hours

and there are definitively no apples

to be sweetened.

                          But I mean

the bullet did not meet its mark

today. I mean stay with the boat.

I’m saying we’ve split sweetness into

a million names I can put into my mouth

when the annihilating curtain falls.

I can put my hand out and feel bark,

This poem is the winner of the 2026 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize.