The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Amy Miller's "White Noise Lullaby"

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Six Objects That Are Mine
and One That Isn’t

After a day of doctors and work
and money and even
the painstaking steering
to not hit that jerk
in the parking garage,
the soft hermetic
closing of my door sounds
like an army of angels
laying down their guns.
And my kitchen, the last
brown shards of sunset
sliding their blades
across the cabinets,
suddenly is paradise, the faucet
playing small creek music
as six objects on the sill—
two horses, a soapstone god,
the clock, the cup and bowl—
hold quiet court with the one
I’ll never fully own, the plant
turning its panels to light
and mining a life
from its fistful of soil.

This selection comes from Amy Miller’s chapbook White Noise Lullaby available now from Cyclone Press. Purchase your copy here!

Amy Miller‘s poetry has appeared in Bellingham Review, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Permafrost, Rattle, and ZYZZYVA, and the online chapbookRough House (whiteknucklepress.com). She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, as well as the Whiskey IslandPoetry Prize and the Cloudbank Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and the 49th Parallel Award. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal, works as the publications project manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

Noh Anothai was a researcher with the Thailand-United States Education Foundation (Fulbright Thailand) from 2011-12. In that time he translated programs and hosted cultural events for Thailand’s College of Dramatic Arts under the Ministry of Culture. Winner of Lunch Ticket’s inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multilingual Texts in 2014, Anothai’s original poems and translations of Thai poetry have appeared in Ecotone, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. He has contributed to Words Without Borders and Tin House, and serves as a reader for the international River Styx poetry contest. He teaches for the online MFA program in Creative Writing at Lindenwood University.