Having always moved as one,
just before midnight they drop from the air,
the sky finally learning how to fall.
They bounce like hailstones, two thousand
red hearts broken on still wings.
Nothing tasted right that day.
I tried to eat things I’d eaten before
but they crumbled weirdly on my tongue.
It was my mouth that was different.
It would never hold your name again
because it had to stay with me in this world,
a place you no longer knew how to be.
She is a jungle on the wall,
dark and soft in the hollows of her arms,
the sweet viney V of her legs,
lush flora that stretches to her navel.
She looks sideways at her giraffe and it looks back.
It knows she is the more beautiful thing.
The lady was always there; my father bought her before he met me.
Before I was old enough for shyness, he drew animals
on my bare stomach for my mother to wash off in the bath.
There must have been other creatures, but I remember only giraffes.
When I drift away at the end of my life to a place half-imagined in charcoal,
I will meet her, and I will touch my fingertips to black foliage.
I wind up and throw myself into the river in Januaries
when the ice floats lazy and fierce just beyond reach.
My whole body goes under, toes, hips, and eyelashes,
the cold a shock like meeting God.
No part of me remains, not a toe or hip or eyelash.
I baptize myself in this erasure.
This is how I pray for you, the only way I know how.
When I can breathe again, you are what I remember exists.
Amanda Hempel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she currently lives. Her poetry appears in several places, including The Literary Review, Fogged Clarity, Regarding Arts & Letters, The Briar Cliff Review, Zouch Magazine and Miscellany, and Red River Review. She received her MFA Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and serves as Poetry Editor for Flywheel Magazine.
ART FEATURE:
An Introduction
to Deltiology
ISSUE:
W I N T E R
2011-2012
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