Flashing
red and white light
above wild clay cliffs
will fade to memory without
rescue.
Overnight Poems
Lip
He sees
structure in her
she might destroy again
without his voice’s midnight calm
to soothe.
White Space
Time out
chairs in corners
of a widening room
beckon her to retrieve those lost
daydreams.
26th & Lyndale Again
Dreams that open
vaults might release
phantom lovers
with guitars. Live
music gets played
in a bar
meant for only
one thing—living
to drink. And
she doesn’t
anymore—drink
that is. Rumor
of a nickname
for her
she doesn’t
recognize. VIP
status gets a seat
on a fireplace
hearth. Who
can remember
how their bodies
came to collide
in five
easy moves.
Was it
like this? Probably
not, but a fire
burning on a cold
November night
could dissolve
the need to know.
Laugh Phoenix
You are my laughing phoenix,
I am yours.
Our cackling woke the dead.
Endlessly we cracked jokes
waiting for the fire engines (not red)
to arrive.
No, wait! Hurry! Get back
inside. Let the smoke
choke us out of five hundred years’
worth of played-out puns.
Six hundred too many Arabian nights
have us cracked up under the moon.
Reduced to ashes, we could ask to be blood-red,
winged beauties next to one another
shaking feathers forever in the desert.
But you would not reinvent yourself
with me. For me,
the ashes scatter irreverently. For you,
tradition’s fire in the belly burns
as you wait for ladders and hoses.
Dry as the skin of wakened dead,
the puns will reduce me
to tears for five hundred or so
more years. Unless, of course,
you weren’t my last,
laughing one.
More Delicious
Where does the pain go
when she stops
feeling it? When
it is no longer
masked by
drugs or delusion. When
the physical becomes
emotional becomes
psychological dares
to become
spiritual. Couldn’t it
just be?
Brackish
She threw
nostalgia in—
along with your initials.
“Turn all
post-war, pre-washed, personal works
over for good, or
for as long as it takes
to forget
again.”
Another message
written in poor
handwriting, stuffed
in a glass
bottle to be tossed
into another body
of water—salt or fresh,
or in between.
In Six Days
The counting may stop,
the spinning through
a thousand seasons
in a day may
become a memory. Or,
it won’t. Who
can predict
how my feet
will move
on the island
at dawn.
Risk Crossing
And more deadlines to meet
even in dreams. With extra
obstacles and an octopus
of black power
cords that need to get
from A to B
before dawn. And the fishing
might be
good if it rains. And that man
who walks his Cavalier
King Charles
Spaniel near the archery
range just might be
the last man she kissed good-night.
July 27: 11 Months
Startled by the number 27
on my apartment door,
the nearest cross
street to an avenue
I used to live on. Where
did it factor
in your life
before it became
the day you died?
No reflexes can wake you
now, no tallies
too low, temperatures
too high. You used
to say time
was make believe,
manufactured to manage obsessions—
yours, mine, the rest
of the world’s. When light
rain placates a summer afternoon,
I wonder who
did the making and what
materials were used. You would
have known. Which mattered
most—the distance
you traveled or the moments
passed observed? You kept track
of both despite everything
because you knew
no other way to live.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 