by Amy Miller

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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I had forgotten about you
until this morning at Denny’s
when I didn’t have enough quarters
for a newspaper and pulled,
instead, this book from my purse,
laid in for such emergencies.

And there you were,
asserting your opinions in black ballpoint,
two stars next to the titles
you obviously liked,
crossed-out lines
you seemed to think superfluous—
scratched-off Wasatch,
penned-in mountains.

And then the waitress frowned
when I told her no hashbrowns.
She asked again—no potatoes?
No grits?—as if to correct
this error in the book
of my morning. She scrawled a note
in her own book, lips tight.

But she brought me the eggs
and you finally left the poet alone
as he went on to talk
of farmers, as his horse changed leads
on command, and sometimes not.
And it’s hard to tell
whether you simply tired
of the old, old game—
this singular shaping, this lonely work
for the betterment of us all—
or whether the poet won you over,
maybe with those lines on page 40
about chickens and the little
swaybacked shed he can’t
bring himself to knock down,
beautiful it its disrepair.

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Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the 2022 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, and her full-length book, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the 2017 Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. She received a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

by Amy Miller

She hides in the east shadow
of a thirty-foot wall. She might
remember damp hands
of ivy, but now she tangles
only with herself, limbs
on fractured limb, sparse leaves
cupping small swallows of light.
What can she say, embarrassed,
when pink silk shoots out
from her every cleft in April
in—yes—the rain’s warm lick.

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Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press, and her chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). She lives in Oregon.

by Amy Miller

waves to her and whispers
while she suns and tunes out
the argument nextdoor. It hides her
like a small lost city. In it,
the wind sounds like money
or silk, depending
on her dream.

The committee
wants to pull it up, dig those
fisted roots and all
two feet deep of tendrils.
Grind it. Poison. Everyone’s
got it, everyone’s complaining,
shoots shoving up through earth
sixty feet away, fence and flagstone
pushed aside, the restless body
unburying.

It helps her
not to see. Rain runs
from leaf to leaf to leaf,
miraculous endless waterfalls
feeding the rivers
she knows are living
under her feet.

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Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

by Amy Miller

What grew in the wrong direction,
what’s blocking the light—I’m trying
to be kind here, your missteps, misshapes
bloated by last year’s rain. Long handles
and a small steel tooth lop off beauty
sometimes too—I’m sorry
if you thought you were perfect.
You were killing yourself.

Wrong ladder, saw too short, I wake
the neighbor’s hangover cracking
through branches. Crazy-haired tree,
wild profusion frozen in the air—
I see now that you dreamt the hell
out of summer while I slept,
my elbows bound in grief.
Some warm afternoons—I remember—
I woke to the sound of bees
singing little farmer songs,
working in the sudden acres
of your bloom.

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Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.