How Slow
I was driving into such a famous moment.
I was driving slow, you know, I was famous.
You were going to make me famous.
It was a bird flu kind of day, so I drove
Slow and panicked slow and read the paper
Slow so I could grow famous, slow.
I took my soap slow to the road
With a red bucket and slowly washed the slow streets,
Emptied the trash, my heavy hands!
This could be our life: this sentence.
No one on the platform hates you, hurts you.
Nobody’s riding alone on the slow train.
I was running up the hill to meet you.
For the first time you were famous again,
And we drank lemonade that made us shy.
It’s this – in a letter, dear me, dear I.
Our antlers shed slow in the winter
Of this army of bitters.
My brain is a rough cow to slaughter,
Famous daughter I am of you, this love.
The beak burrows slow in the earth.
Illness makes the heart hard, fonder.
I crave the slow sizzle of meat, lean
In the famous heat. Come sit by me.
This bench is the white bench, famous
For all the kicking and beginning, a birth
Slow to tangle in the blood.
I love you, I love you.
I’m famous for loving you, slow.
The Other Side
Then through the night the wall is built
Inside the mind and God climbs slow
Declares a storm that floods the ears and stings
The throat and makes the neck greedy for hands
Here is the body that sleeps with these sounds,
Pities the glass and its distance from the sill
When I was little, I used to have a dream
About a baby in a bucket that curled like a maggot
And slept until it disappeared, no, multiplied
Into many babies asleep on many doorsteps
I need a lullaby tonight, a hammering song
To pound away the bricks and the weeds
Here, God, up you go, God, over the wall
Inside my mind, God, up you go.
Men, Return to Your Waiting Wives!
Remember their shark fearing lives.
They sit on ledges and knit your socks.
They sit on couches and pick your locks.
I don’t share a bedroom with their dreams.
You hide them in your tall green jacket.
When your wives go searching
For the doctor’s number, they find
My vivid markings on your back.
If all the world’s a stage, what of women
Who circle the local park? Every
Man has found his young lady to love.
I sleep in snowy black yards
Above layers of skin called leaves.
It is too cold to walk home.
Men, return now to your wives
And let me sleep. Their hives
Worsen in your heat. Abscess
Insists on despair and your women know
Well how to stitch a suture.
Even when gone for days with me,
They still repair your thinning hair.
Men! Return to your waiting wives.
Goat Shadows
Everyone had lots of good ideas.
We were young and we stank,
Walked down tracks in army pants
Smashing glass in empty lots, big deal.
We wanted to be liked, we tried.
Posed for boyfriends and made pies.
Carved our names into palms and bark,
Bled our goodbyes in firefly shadows.
We sipped and skipped till our lungs
Fanned out like limp winter kites.
If we were wrong, we’re sorry.
We can’t take it back, we won’t.
Our bee-hiving, our hibernating
Our midnight bones and jokes –
It’s not anything we can erase,
Except the face of it, the mistake.
We were baby goats having baby
Goats, without a prairie for luck.
Our boyfriends turned to fish tanks
for their staring, and we swam.
Our bodies held a civilized hurt:
To deny the animal born inside us.
We loved our aborted babies,
Our kindergarten of mossy loss:
We reached to teach their small
Goat-shadows a thing or two about love.
Good and luck don’t matter soon.
Kissing won’t soon save us.
Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein was a 2002 Illinois Arts Council Finalist in Poetry, a 2006 recipient of a
Vermont Studio Center fellowship in poetry, and has published poems and essays
in various journals and magazines around the country. Most recently her work has
appeared in horse less review and Konundrum Literary Engine.