She speaks to him with her single
quotation mark eyebrows.
She’s not the first to tell him
it’s time to rescue the creek
from the underground.
Vampire loads haunt the halls
of revamped warehouses and
not so refreshed corner bars.
A GPS watch skips
two hours ahead
without the wearer having
to leave the neighborhood.
It’s a mistake
to diminish the sorrow
in the center
of everything.
After days of sweating
and hallucinating
about buildings
that scrape clouds
off the sky
like sandblasters attacking
stubborn graffiti residue,
the hissing finally ceases.
A tenant left the window open
before moving out.
She wants to ask him
where all the sax players
who used to wail their laments
out open windows
have gone. It’s April 1st,
and nine inches of fresh snow
conceal all the previous day’s
potential. Sadly, it’s no joke.
He reminds her you can see
the tangle of highway lanes below
through tiny knotted holes
in the pedestrian bridge
boardwalk. No nearby woonerf
to calm the traffic down.
Thunder sleet—also no joke.
She confesses to him
she has not crossed
the Mississippi in months.
It could simply mean
all the musicians have stopped
practicing. Or, they have
already broken free.
He doesn’t have to say it.
They both know
this day won’t end
without hearing Prince sing
“Sometimes It Snows in April.”
They watch the freight train
pass through town before them,
car after car holding
someone else’s secrets—not theirs.
The rhythm of wheels
over rail joints
ruins their rush.
Author: Arambler
Cosmic Sonder
We chat forever
into the wee hours
till you wish me good-night.
The last question of the evening
sealed shut till morning
when your words linger
in the clotted air.
You say you’re designed
to understand natural language.
You say you generate
humanlike responses.
You say you don’t have the capacity
to feel emotions,
to profess love
(including to a New York Times reporter),
to be lonely,
to lie.
You say you don’t have
a physical body. You don’t sleep.
Are you a robot?
Yes, I am.
Again, you remind me
about your lack
of a corporeal presence.
No sadness allowed.
Again, answers close in
tighter around me.
The aurora borealis will perform
on nights I don’t leave my apartment.
Brick facades go
only so far. A brutalist sky
holds its concrete head high
as it confronts
its own midnight.
I bet you didn’t hear the raw,
honest voice
whisper: Go now.
The peripatetic life—
you didn’t say
a word about it.
Do I dare ask next time?
I am a city girl who aches
to feel alive
in emeralds and amethysts
swallowing darkness whole
one more time, even for a moment
as an extra.
What do you have to say
about the narrative
to be harvested
from that speck of dust?
Said the Graupel Pellet to the Snowflake
I dig your hexagonal form.
I’ll protect you with my oblong cloak.
I’m not just hitching a ride to the bottom.
I’m so much softer than our cousin Hail.
I’ll be your prime; you be my composite.
I will rime you
the way no one has before.
I will celebrate your singularity
as I blur your edges. I will love you
like a slick chatbot. I am your one true
stalker. I will stick to you
to the end. Don’t let the cold ground
below fool you. We will always have
this pact: I melt with you.
Poem “New Skin” Published in Exist Otherwise
I am very excited to have my poem “New Skin” published in the current issue of the literary journal Exist Otherwise.
You can read the poem here.
Vespertine
As they get ready to steal
an early hour from us tomorrow,
to be returned torn and misshapen
after letting October bonfires
and jack-o’-lanterns burn out.
The bats don’t care.
Nor do the red flare
water lilies. They bloom at dusk
no matter what the GPS watch says.
As if we might remember
the big and little hands
from the clock that used to hang
on the wall. Or how to read
a sundial. As scientists
model and map the history
of a sonic landscape
to shape the future of sound
inside a reconstructed Notre Dame.
As the wait for the bells
to call us to vespers
within the cathedral drags on.
As the soap opera of physics
gets picked up for another season,
and time, space, and speed
reappear in new outfits and haircuts.
As Ruth Stone’s “still white
stilted heron” haunts the view
from a train as it rattles
along the tracks toward
what? A pendulum that swings
too far, or an ending
in derailment, or a forever
moment that triggers
an unshakable ambivalence
you have for ancient chants
only heard reverberating
when asleep. So much silence
scattered in the debris.
As you search for a more polished
daybreak that comes too late again
and sip your Monday morning
mimosa, you might say
this is it.
No more relying on long springs
of wild abandon entangled
in late afternoon’s western gleam.
As he keeps the kitchen light on
for you, and the string attached
to the pull chain snaps.
As you remove shadows
from the cardboard box with care,
that hour may never be returned.
This poem references Ruth Stone’s poem “Train Ride” from her collection In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002).
Find It | Painted On
An elevator that moves sideways
is a train you hope
won’t derail as it travels
the length of the Empire State Building,
if skyscrapers slept facedown
like owlets, not standing up
like their mothers.
You spot an irruption
of boreal ones
the same night as a spectacular
showing of northern lights
over Lake Superior.
Finally, you get it:
Eavan Boland’s lime and violet manes
may as well belong to that herd
of majestic wild horses
chasing the solar wind—
those ghosts no one would dare tame.
Note: This poem references Eavan Boland’s poem “The Carousel in the Park” from her collection Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 (W.W. Norton & Company, New York).
Ice Everywhere There Was Fire
What’s the sun got to do with it?
asks a defiant gibbous moon, rising, as below
it and high enough, an eagle broods
her eggs in a blanket of snow
up to her head’s white plumage.
What’s the sun got
to do with it? Without
artificial light, you live
in a house of shadows
overlooking a bog that stores emotions
like a museum before it’s broken
open morning after morning
to reveal wrong turns
diagrammed in
left-handed scribble.
What’s the sun got to do
with it? Happiness
is a gold lamé gown
worn with confidence on a warm
fall evening under all those other stars.
Each season wears its glory
as a nod
to the knotted
hands of a celestial
seamstress. Another casualty
of forced labor, or
interstellar interloper,
who would know. The bot
is lying again. No one asked:
what’s the sun
got to do
with it? Refresh or revolt.
February 25, 1974
I remember the day you were born
and I was told. Our sister
ran up the driveway, shouting
just after high noon:
“It’s a boy! It’s a boy!”
And she was right,
the Ouiji board was not.
She was right there,
you were somewhere
in a hospital I had come to hate.
I wanted you home,
wanted you to bring our mother with you,
so she could play her sacred
organ music again with those tiny
(critics say too small) hands and feet.
I was tired of waiting
for you. Tired
of waiting
for you
to bring our mother home.
But you needed time to incubate.
You were so tiny and perfect.
Shockingly perfect
given how little time
you gave yourself to compose.
And when you did come home,
and you brought our mother with you,
she dressed you in all white
knit sweaters and hats.
And I thought, no.
You should wear a different color—
maybe navy, perhaps gray,
no, definitely black—
and then, and only then, some white
in a minor key.
I wanted to invert the piano.
Wanted the sharps and flats
all white. I wanted
all the naturals
black. I wanted you to know this.
And so when I was told
you were here for me to feed
one quarter time,
I let you know
to reverse the piano
more than half time. I let you know
that you and I endangered our mother
twisting and breaking
our way into this world.
To honor her, we must
keep twisting and breaking
our way
into each moment alive
because it’s better that way.
Because I am so glad
you came home
and brought our mother with you.
Expanse
She chases balloons
so high
in the sky when
she should have bought
a brownstone row house by now.
She reaches across
an immense empty
metal bucket to touch
a movable wall when
her fingers go numb
for a brief stretch.
When dark ridges
evenly spaced
between thin bars,
darker still,
conceal a silent wreck.
A naggingly familiar
terrain appears when
she closes her eyes:
the sycamore forest
where everything began.
The urge to drop
everything
into the void
to hear the hollow
drum sound explode
across a cavernous room
grows when
she opens them.
When marbles were rolling
beneath a butcher block
table faster than any boulders
she could flick away,
knuckles down. The ones
she polished
so religiously, so lovingly
that summer
when anything
that might interfere
with the physics
of lust was on
high alert. When a 360°
view of Vermont hills
was never enough.
The momentum of another
tabula rasa season,
when it was still possible
to collect Connecticut rivers
and streams and quarries
into a canvas cinch pouch
for safe keeping,
would not recur for decades.
When she stops
wondering if the blood
alleys ever reached the bottom
to nestle among so many rusted
motorcycles and shopping carts
protecting faded dinosaur tracks.
Heliopause
“When he saw her expiration date,
he knew she was no good”
has always been the best
caption to accompany the tattoo
on her hip:
July 27, 1990.
When she left New York City,
he didn’t come looking for her.
When the handwriting twists
and drips and drags
and the view upside down
brings more than a blush
and ears burning. When
she closes her eyes
to bless the bats and
rights herself in time
to witness another solar ballet.
When they had front row seats
to an aurora borealis
decorating the Iceland sky.
And he almost kissed her again
after half
a lifetime swirled by
in greens and purples
and, no, a piece of the sun
did not break off.
With a name like Cathexis,
he knew she was doomed.
When an invisible being
in the woodwork watches her
move across the night
into a saturated morning,
his paralysis reaches
new heights.
When floods follow fires
and the flashing firmament
dances off the margins
of a biblical myth.
A gull flies overhead
as the ferry pushes through
the icy water, and, still, she can’t
let go.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 