strangers at the next table
speak so loudly
you can’t capture the next
image in its naked moment
the way Bachelard would have wanted.
Instead, you hear:
If you get chickens,
don’t sleep with them.
I heard about a woman
who slept with a snake.
My sister tried to sleep
with me last night.
That mannequin has no clothes on—
visible or invisible
to the naked eye. And you
like the red cat stick figure
bike corral best.
sunny with a real feel of 5
degrees Fahrenheit
another cruel moment in April
gets trapped under ice
no algae
nothing’s blooming
good or bad
here where the climate trickster
of our own making
never sleeps
Frankenstein’s monster drinks
from the fetid future
has not yet learned
how to lie
he won’t open his eyes underwater
he won’t tell us what he hears
in all that muffled blue
his silence is damaged
if he would declare his damage
it would spill then bleed
into the fibers
of a wrongly-folded map
someone has abandoned
on the frozen ground
remember those
pockets of jamais vu
dot the landscape
with crimson-tinted notes
in the minor key
no one asks to be
the hero image
that spans an iridescent bridge
to nowhere
I remember Jim Carroll serenading us with his needle
sharp poems from the bottom of Foss Hill.
I remember Spring Fling 1984.
(Or, was it 1983?)
Spotting the old observatory
crowning the top, he snarls
at our impossibly young distracted selves:
You can all go look at the fuckin’ stars.
Some loudmouth students reply:
Just wait till nightfall, Jim. Just wait.
All I catch is
fuckin’ stars.
I remember shadow echoes
and the storms they cause crashing around me
by the time I hop on the back
of the last motorcycle I will ever ride.
Racing downhill in the dark
spitting out grass, dirt, and famous feathers.
duende
1. weigh
2. polling
3. train
4. filling
5. space
6. police
7. bus
8. first aid
9. fire
10. subway
11. work
12. TV
13. weather
14. way
And the radio plays without stanza break deep into another Friday night at the end of March.
saudade
she knows about near drowning
that boy in the pool
is her brother
she fishes for lefthanded
compliments with a seine net
made of prairie grass
and urban river sweat
back to the boy
her sisters rescue
they grip his chubby little ankles
shake him upside down
water and leaves spilling from his mouth
frozen in place
she watches from an upstairs window
as the sisters save the brother’s life
months later tests show
no evidence of dry drowning
damage to the brain
the story begins
as a bond between siblings
becomes one between mother and son
she is the most reliable narrator
she can be at age 10
back to standing perfectly still
in lefthanded river muck
with the sun capturing
a startling silver shimmer in her hair
back to loving to swim
in oceans best
Frenzied, under the influence
of one oddly calm chthonic deity,
I follow some secret motet
to its chromatic source.
I see vapor failures
in this cliff that bluffs
safety on a questionable plateau.
The sickly sweet smell of snake
head rot won’t lure
the Round Island burrowing boa
out of extinction. And Sudan’s death
leaves Najin and Fatu
to graze in their shrunken crash, awaiting
in vitro fertilization.
African elephants are next—
I sing of drowning and dying of thirst.
1, 2, 3
testing is now
complete / poetry
will resume
based on true events
of the imagination
as snow falls
all over
the vernal equinox
if you rescue
the whooping crane
what about
the akikiki
or southern rockhopper penguin
or yellow-faced bee
gray bat
or red wolf
staghorn coral
or monkey puzzle
Noah’s excuses for taking another
swig of the wine bottle
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 