Amy King is the author of I¹m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from BlazeVOX Books, and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press).  She is the editor-in-chief for the literary arts journal, MiPOesias, an interview correspondent for miPOradio, and the editor of the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania).  Amy teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.  Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry.  She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. Visit www.amyking.org for more.

Red With Forever’s Fat Hunger

The time we spend together goes and you

have flapped your legs the length to Croatia,

flanked by Italy’s posture,

melted with dust, melted with your

entire sky, lit only by night’s light

& the architecture of a woman in her Zadar bed.

Mountains burp a descending forgiveness

that filled your other Brooklyn

with Indian ink the soft down fur of a decade. 

Our backyard has grown eight little feet

in the dampening snow

even as you cut the fat from

a foreign piglet, haul it to the farmland’s end,

the razored woods, in a father’s overgrown boots—

your male-patterned half.  A pianist digs

her own cellar too

through holy frost the Adriatic brings,

and here I join you in Lidia’s hut

where Eastern Europeans never sell

magazines or cookbooks or a garlic

pasta touched by the sea organ’s fingers,

her ageless liver that filters a mountain’s pines,

Or, in the clearing where our brains exhale,

the weight of money and money’s craft.

We might bend to some small fire,

a frying pan, a rabbit or bass, raw butter,

our cooling backs, wrought iron fingers,

worked to a lather, and remember. 

At five o’clock, the roads busy with ants like us

and somewhere equidistant is

my foot from brake to accelerator,

tomorrow’s small plump body

that bounds among the bark,

by a garbage trough, on stones that work

the earth, and these slurping souls,

red with forever’s fat hunger.  Such lullabies

play a gentle notch that point the way to arms

that wrap your Zagreb around my shoulders.