by Amanda Moore
All in by Amanda Moore
Pretend it was a different adventure:
by Amanda Moore
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.
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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.
by Amanda Moore
I’ve lived in three homes in this town.
In three homes, wasps
nestled my walls:
paper hives blooming wildly,
unwanted August weeds.
They burrow toward my sleeping sounds at night,
and in the day they track me,
little sentinels from door
to driveway to door again.
The Bee Man arrives,
poisons this new nest
and can only cross his fingers.
Once before they died in pools
along my porch. Another,
they chewed through the wall and writhed
in inch-thick ribbons on my bed
until death gripped them in its teeth.
Once nestled, a home cannot
cut wasps loose to life, send them flying
to wilder, wider eaves,
an abandoned house or hollow tree—
this isn’t like the mother’s body, baby
breaking womb to emerge alive
and far from what it fed upon.
The house swells with wasps
that will be carried out only by death.
I am not afraid of such evil birth.
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Amanda Moore's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and SWWIM Every Day, and she is currently a fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. A high school English teacher, Amanda lives by the beach with her husband and daughter in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. More about her work is available at http://amandapmoore.com.
by Amanda Moore
Pretend it was a different adventure:
we traveled in our Chrysler down
8 Mile Road as if in a dinghy
gliding from the bright layer cake of yacht
toward an undiscovered port. Pretend
we were prepared for the awkwardness
of being foreign, of seeking flimsy familiarity
and the perfect snapshot to send home.
We pictured white sheets and hand-holding,
new scenery and our faces changed.
But really it was like the tropics in July: sweaty
and panting, private and primal.
Paradise to one traveler is often hell for another,
so I won’t bore you with the hours passed
watching the ocean swell and retreat,
the tall grasses bend and part in the wind
and some crazy, hooting monkey pulling itself up and down
impossibly straight tree trunks.
When we left at last we had a souvenir,
a golden idol shaped by heat
and meant to be worshipped.
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