This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Day I Am a Field by Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press 2022).
Noir
My mother cried on her satin pillowcase.
I never knew why, want to move toward her
wherever she is, ask what darkness
she could not crawl out of.
There are things I will never know,
though she told me:
I didn’t hold you enough, uncomfortable with touch.
When my daughter was born, I held her
as a cloud holds on to rain as long as it can.
Now my love, on spoonbill legs,
ribs butting out against skin wafer-thin,
unlocks his mouth when he naps,
beaking for words lost to him.
The painter Pierre Soulages
said black is never the same
from morning to afternoon
to night and morning again.
Like my body,
dressing and undressing
in the dark. I put a hand
over my eyes until light
lifts me toward another body,
its leaves falling from branches.
It’s ridiculous we are not trees,
though I want to be.
And since skin on skin breaks open all sorrow—
no—a turning away or fear of becoming
him, I don’t hold him enough.
When no one is looking, I will walk
into the painting, thick black shoots,
unfastened trees in search of light.
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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