This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Day I Am a Field by Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press 2022).
Saying It, At the Art Gallery
after Eileen Goodman, Tumbling Clementines
A shadow, across orange clementines tumbling out of their bowl
asks the right question. One clementine, left behind, swears: I have nothing to say.
But where is she, the artist?
The pine crate slightly left of the light, she might be
the shadow lifted on elbows or the mouth, magenta & opened.
~
Later look out our window at the black locust, how it turrets
behind a milky shade that limits light and dark,
& the tree is separate from & we are separate from.
Except I want to tell you how my husband refused to kill a red ant
because an ant’s antennae are bent like arms at the elbows, because it might have family,
he really did say, then ferried it out on his gigantic finger.
~
& how within limits of light & dark
I am still mother, sister, lover.
Do you think it ends?
Vagina, breasts, the body as porringer, a bleeding bowl?
~
Know this: The words are not leaving or left or if.
The words are: I will look for him,
his scent of magenta, the red of his ant.
~
Fact: Clementines are seedless if grown in isolation.
~
My words are seeds.
If when leaves no apart from the other.
My mouth red & hunted.
I have said it:
When he dies. When.
Amy Small-McKinney’s second full-length book, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). Her chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID and her husband’s death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Small-McKinney’s newest book & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre) is due out early 2025. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, The Baltimore Review, Literary Mama, Persimmon Tree, Vox Populi, ANMLY, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others, and have also appeared in several anthologies. She has also been translated into Korean and Romanian. Small-McKinney was the 2011 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate. She resides in Philadelphia where she has taught workshops and independent students.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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