This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Day I Am a Field by Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press 2022).
During The Pandemic You Are Dying At Home
Sparrows nibble at your blanket
dive in and out of the eaves of your mouth.
Wings rimmed with tatting.
Tattooed beaks add color to an otherwise
bland room. The hard-working birds
will not speak to me yet.
This is not the life I planned.
Now the sky closes its doors and trees shrink
into fetal positions. Your body shrinks.
You forget where you are where
you are going. Your hospital bed tries to explain:
You don’t belong anymore.
This is not the life we planned.
We are breezeless our window won’t open.
I wait with the sparrows for a sign
to kiss your confused mouth goodbye.
You say:
“I’m moving three across three down.”
“What if my pee is poison?”
“Get me my shoes.”
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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