09-06-2022
Amber Flora Thomas
ORCHID
Down in the holy
and maiden where
the singing is,
where you drink
and cup the rain
and cling to an
everglade mound.
The narrow throng
where amethyst deepens
into black, a place
waiting in the animal night
to be scooped up
or left alone—
the frill labellum. The shroud
where the shoot births
unfurling tongues
that couldn’t hide their waves
when I brought you
to the nursery.
All around you a light
that put the pearl in there
and kneaded it like a pit
some girl could spit
into her palm.
ROOTED
If the beetle’s black slips into iridescence
If the splinter and raft merge
If summer waste turns to awe
If against the weathered wood you write her name
If dappling etches through
If heather rusts in the drinking trough
If you look back
If she looks back
and the wing begins as a shell
and the rope spells between the rocks
If you drop the seed in and an oak climbs out
who then gathers
when you turn your singing away?
when you ball your socks in your boots
and wade out to the gods (minnows, all)
what about your hours then?
when you’ve waited for the shell
to shake loose your wings?
WHY I GO BACK
To dive into breath
trapped by rolling green
air. To force my limbs open
and ring my tongue
in there, ready for praise
and the accolades of time
to free myself.
To unglue my spine
from shallows and tear myself
further down into silence,
so I can rise
from the deepest pool
among no others.
I towel off,
bent into pouring gaze
and stippled chill.
It is morning
and I’ve stopped
along Navarro River.
The past entered
here again,
so I dive.
-from Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press 2018), selected by Fall 2022 Guest Editor, Michael Walsh
Born and raised in northern California, poet Amber Flora Thomas earned a BA at Humboldt State University and an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her lyric poems often engage the body as a record of loss and accrual. She is the author of Red Channel in the Rupture (2018), The Rabbits Could Sing (2012), and The Eye of Water (2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (2006).
04-13-2021
Victoria Chang