This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Day I Am a Field by Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press 2022).
In the Near Dark, Gratitude
For long grass with purple tips.
For thin sweetgrass braided like hair.
For not falling, a curb’s refusal to accept an errant shoe.
Thank you for these legs. The origin of a hum from bile and ash into
almost-belief.
For these minutes I move toward grasses that move toward me
into a breeze that hasn’t learned the silence of my new country.
My country, I, fighting for its life.
Against despair. Its constrictor-knot, no-music no-sun signing for help.
For long grass, Purple Tears, sheared back.
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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