Blip Magazine Archive

 blipmagazine.net

 

Home : Archive : Links

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.

Maintained by Blip Magazine Archive at www.blipmagazine.net

Copyright © 1995-2011
Opinions are those of the authors.