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.
Twigs | Blades | Digs
And then the groundhog died.
No weather breeder,
neither calm
nor a forecaster
of future tempests.
Once upon a
time
was the same thing
as the storm
pounding the bay, or
wrecking your head. Rites of
passage. Temporal
differences in behavior
separate us. Your day
begins as the great horned owl’s
ends. Remember
when your nocturnal behavior
led to these scraps
of paper. Unrecognizable
handwriting in
an unidentifiable language
that curls | collides | crashes
before leaking
off the page.
It’s not a question
mark. It’s a pipe
you won’t light.
A bar we can’t erase.
You are so beyond
vaping. Know nothing
about navigating helicopters
through the fog.
We can’t drag
an atmospheric river
in search of survivors.
They say
it died while hibernating
in its den late last year.
(not created with ChatGPT)
Smudge
You invite butterflies to check into
your bug hotel. You never know.
Everything’s in dispute these days.
Mystery boarders may burrow
in the hollows beneath the stairs.
You build over old mistakes.
The copper trimmed hipped
rooftop. The vertical cypress
siding. The slotted
front entrance. You believe
you have thought of everything
this time. A tall mounting stake rises
above the last words
you murmur at dawn.
The ladybug is a beetle
is not always a lady
the way those polka-dotted scarlet
domes open to expose
the real secret: escape wings
that unfold to four times
the size of the mere body. Sprung
free, let’s fly away abroad
before the warning
coloration flames flicker out.
Let’s sip tainted wine by the bottle,
a soft-spoken whisper drifts
through open windows
on the backs of afternoon
gusts. As the sun sets, mourning
cloaks settle into a lone pile
of logs stacked against an undisturbed,
lichen-encrusted stone wall—
without mortar. The only
protection a funeral
home moon garden needs.
As night blooms,
white-lined sphinx moths
come to mark the pale evening
primroses blessed.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 