Amy King
Evening In
Mother phoned the premature
death
of father to me. A machine
shuffled
the words. I played back the
story
of my childhood and grieved.
After
dinner, blocks of rectangular
teak
wood fell, then floated,
mistaken
for cork. Expectations boiled
over
Aunt Max's black pot rim. We
were
all enchanted when the little
kettle
dripped and wrote proverbs to
complete
our pact with amazing
accents. Dessert
hints wafted past raised cups
of
home-ground coffee,
whiskey-tinted,
under the blue haze of living
room light.
The Late Show Effect
I swallowed hard the whole
bottle of your footsteps
and just fit into the cup of
a nightingale's tear
Or will you become my
fragrant flash in the pan,
my dusted desire to be right
up against it
Feed on ears of popcorn, pull
the blinds, am now in disguise
beneath the covers, one leg
stretches beside a leg outstretched
We transform into the middle
of morning's minutes
accepting the fat of the wing
& every nun's humming cargo
It has often been Jesus who
attacks, one without the other
I, in turn, played Jack
Nicholson for the duration of the film,
Besides, all future visions
are off. Watching the death of someone
close by, our close-captioned
feet couldn't get traction.
Over there, the elbow girl
spends her time with lotions and days
alone inside focus on
characters, ignore the past, consider revisions.
Amy King
's work is
forthcoming in Aphrodite of the Spangled
Mind (New York),
Eclectica Magazine,
Combo
(Pennsylvania), Eclectica
Magazine,
Lodestar Quarterly,
SleepingFish.net, Tarpaulin Sky and Word
For/Word. Her
ebook,
The Citizen's Dilemma,
is available at Duration Press.
Her chapbook,
The People
Instruments,
won the Pavement Saw Press
award in 2002. Amy currently teaches English at Nassau Community
College. Please visit her website at
www.amyking.org.