These two poems by Amy Leigh Davis illuminate the role of duality in finding peace and acceptance in a volatile world after experiencing the loss of a sibling and the end of a significant relationship…
by: Amy Leigh Davis
a few thoughts on desire
the cold electricity of his traveling keeps
the spine from straightening
we bend under his hypnotic euphoria…
real enough to remember
we remember the spokes of the wheels
spinning under brighter days
until language collapses into the rubbish
of unsolved geometry – there is the shape
of a house and the rooms within it
but the lines fall…
*
this doesn’t mean i don’t love you
it just means i don’t love you
enough to endure
the old shape of things
i want you
to be more like that more of
what you’re not
mourning
it is quiet here
ancient wars pulse on the other side
of the earth
the thunder crackles outside
or inside the noise of the clock
ticking off the minutes
outside a mirage of the coming, clouded sun
I practice poetry on the fringes
of my everyday life
a doctor practices medicine at the most mortal
moments at a hospital in Kansas
who ever knew diseases could worsen by sleeping
on feather pillows and buried mold
I said nothing when my brother
confessed he wanted to die
clocks tick in different states
countless people cross conventional lines
why does morning sound the same as mourning?
I wonder this all the time
it is quiet here this morning
though it rains, I am dry, inside
out of the rain. it’s hard to be sad
when you’re on the winning side
of your own war
Amy Leigh Davis is the author of The Alter Ego of the Universe, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Individual poems have recently appeared in SLANT, Right Hand Pointing, Dream Pop and Unlost. She attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshops and studied poetics at the University of Kansas City-Missouri.Author website: amyleighdavis.com.
