This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Day I Am a Field by Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press 2022).
A Woman Named Grief
Removes his name from bank accounts,
signs documents, mails certificates of death.
Buys a new rug, he’s not here to trip
and fall. Its unruly swirls
remind her of roses.
Cobalt blue, mint green, muted reds.
She is not muted. Crimson, furious,
held together by helpless leaves.
In the night, beetles eat away at her roses.
In the morning, the damage is clear.
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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