Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1.
Every body
persists in its state
of rest or somnambulant
motion unless awakened
by a force.
Only in the clinch instant,
the fluttering lids,
the unexpected reversal,
a life is jerked awake.
2.
At the level of Goliath,
the northern face
of the building
was glazed in ice
a stricken air had hardened.
I might have taken my house key
and scratched out a star
on the glass, but
the conspiracy of city lights
would not accept me
into its constellation.
3.
If a horse
in western saddle
and scorpion bolo
could rear up to gallop
on this figured wind
and Marilyn Monroe
could make the subway gust
her tuffet and a wife
could leave a husband,
toss her wedding ring
over the fence of swords
to fall through 103 stories
of leaving to bore
a column through a skull,
surely a private dick could lift
the heavy black receiver
and say no case
too big or small,
and just one man
would finally open
his hand to me,
hold out in the middle
of his palm
a miniature lake
the size of a token.
4.
Every height promises
an energy of falling,
greater for the greater height,
as if in nostalgia for the center.
She had looked so small,
asleep once more and forever,
pillowed on the hood of the car,
one arm crooked under her head,
her legs crossed, ladylike,
at the ankle.
She’d come back to earth,
the robber force,
plundered of her gathered speed
32 feet per second per second.
Amanda Yskamp’s work has been published in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Georgia Review, Boxcar Review, Rattapallax, and Caketrain. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, from which she serves as the librarian at a local school and teaches writing from her online classroom.