Each cell tidy and tight with brood,
what’s mine now
is sunshine and breeze
a gyre of pleasure and labor within.
I can carry it all:
crumb of flower, spittle and weight,
apple tree, blueberry,
what they need but don’t want:
gloved hand or swab.
From a crack in concrete,
from weed
and bombshell I’ll pull
nectar and sweet, a surplus
stacked neat and ready for plunder.
My flight even
is beauty and my churr in the air
the way I scatter beam
and your attention.
But I am tired of being the sting
of closing the door in winter
and sifting wing dust and limb
out front come spring.
I am vein in a seething heart of heat
a single platelet pumped
through the bright organ:
alone I canker and pique.
I don’t want to be
vengeance, to see
in the world only what
I might yet forget to lance.
So I circle and comb,
tend brood, carry out
the dead, lead all
our voices to thrum.
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (Ecco 2021) was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and her essays have appeared in The Baltimore Review and Hippocampus Magazine. Poetry Co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and a reader at VIDA Review and Bull City Press, Amanda is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.
Credit: “The Worker” © 2021 by Amanda Moore, published in Requeening (Ecco 2021). Reprinted with permission of Ecco.
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2021! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 25 through November 12 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 14 and November 21, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2021.
