I stalk your yellow curtains, your
laundry still in the machine, click

my fingernails on the walls,
scratch them into your cheek.

You still dream of me. My kisses
become snakes fanged

into your tongue. Such poison
in our little words. I search

your house, take back
my tiny doll with the rose

quartz heart, tear through
its rotten hydrangea blooms.

I kill what I can.

All my nerves burst under
your blue eyes. I once saw them

as an ocean, but now
a grave I climb back from.

What did you expect?

A woman’s drowning only
goes so far. Look now,

I’m walking your hallways,
still sea-damp and just

as angry. My face a pretty
deathmask. My hair

the dark silt in your throat.

Amanda Auchter

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Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Rust + Moth, The Indianapolis Review, The West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project. She is at work on a third collection of poems, Spellwork. Follow her on Twitter: @ALAuchter.

Artwork: Caryn Drexl
Website: http://www.caryndrexl.com/

31 Oct This entry was published on October 31, 2021 at 12:05 am and is filed under 48 (October 2021), Current Issue, Poetry. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.