Amy King
If an Aging Woman I Am
If plagiarism’s ceiling
fan in my diluted body
leaves a salted outline,
wet and grainy then
These boots come
from the little girl who,
folding a kite, grows toward
a weed, a tiny root growing
seed in tyrannical hues of this
checkout line’s butterfly wife.
No wait, these slippers come
from a part of me that eats
from the shimmering cloud's
white spoon where
she milks horses who rush
the cusp of sleep
Literally, these steel toes come
from making love in a parachute
basket I convince myself
of the danger in expiration
dates as our harmonica doubles
Cremate and billow with cream
turning song beneath
the rug’s nakedness,
cocooning future corpses
we pull closer and lie upon
I’m the Man Who Loves You
The beer has warmed to us.
Like a bear grovels for leftovers,
we are used to blood
in our veins, and other amenities.
Why does every sentence
between us
condemn loneliness?
Even in the womb,
we take note of beings
ushered past.
Love has always been
the woman in the lake.
She is her own sister,
the buoyancy of heartbreak.
Lately, I have had to trick
myself to read
with the promise of a book.
But mostly, I am taken
by the sense
of a blue suede dress
that shrinks to fit you.
The Others
A chess game matches me walking through towns,
wringing pawns behind clocks, days into solitary knights—
Plumed disciples of the world plan religions back to me,
tying strings from my waist to the roots of seconds. Even
dragonflies stammer below the hold of a styrofoam cup
tailored for softer, quieter ears. As the holy man rides,
his hat flies gently behind him, off his head forever, a man.
I have in passage fixed his image. On nearby satellites,
the wind picks up like the bible of leather pants
I never used more than my god-given carte blanche.
Others pray upon hearing my name, whenever I repeat it.
A Throne for the Human Genome
Miscast elephants grate utopia
to bits. I could kill them,
you said as if ants held no place
on the musk of earth, as if unhinged
meant alone. Is it just that cuts
on the hand turn to homes for ghosts
of a tongue, eager and bony-mouthed?
And me with my flying sister always
turning to cancer with long hair black
and flowing; our latest swan song
breathes the personal space of trees.
It’s just that the intersection
of our briefly-lit lives reflects
the economic umber of gunpowder.
Consider the bleach in my pores,
tourniquets that hold our souls’ dusted
fight as visions pour forth: we play
the insects of heartbreak stampeding a path
that bends skylines for life’s fallen few.
Mi Poesias
The fly bothers
no one in
a softly split
brand of sleep
where the ageless
arm’s cloud & wrist
dissolved
leaving her
with a string
in her hand
pointing up.