Autumn House Press, 2024, 88 pp.
Another Queer Love Poem that Fails to Change Anything
Middletown, CA
The air tastes like smoke—
so does my heart.
A blue bunting flits by.
On the window ledge
of this rented house,
two peaches from a poet’s tree.
I am on an adventure.
I am far from home.
And my love, this love—
with whom I’ve had only
a sliver of days, whom I
left again just yesterday,
is a swath of lavender.
I’m a bachelor bee longing
to sleep in her scent.
Outside, stricken mountains
wear their harrowing blond
hair, spiked with burnt trees.
Yesterday’s ocean dries
from my sandals, its sand
still glittering her hair.
I didn’t kiss her.
Ash thickens the sky.
The poet told me
a blackberry varietal
subtracted of thorns
lost its sweetness—
this is desire’s math.
I know. Which is why
I’ll let those peaches ripen
too long until so easily
bruised it’ll be impossible
to tell what tasted them first—
my lips or her thumb.
Hunter’s Moon
Walking below your near fullness, the fullness
of life overtakes me—streetlights
wink off as if masking up. Starlings cascade.
Even in a pandemic there is so much
beauty. What to make of these forty years?
Moon, I have wanted most
to be brave and need nothing—I have wanted
to be someone else. Like you,
I try to hunt everything at once. Like you,
part of me is always turned away.
For once, I don’t want to call love a feral cat;
I want to forgive myself the way water
forgives everything. I don’t know what kind
of animal you stalk, but maybe
my hands can be as true as your stone.
Maybe the work is always reflecting—
tell me, who needs me
to show them how beautiful they are?
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Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and serves as director of MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program. Learn more at amiewhittemore.com.
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