The 2River View 22.3 (Spring 2018)
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Yvonne Amey

 
January, Dam #5 Road, I visit the Cold

Breath is a place where ghosts roam
but I remember this family 
of broken dreams
and how they'd become trapped
inside darkness that smelled of grief
and rain and how they kept to themselves
and how their porch lamp cradled light
in the shape of God
and I know how hard they worked
to get nowhere
and when you smashed
that Jim Beam bottle across my cheekbone
I saw what it looked like when they died alone.

 
you a heart but not glass

I followed your belongings blowing
through old Britner's field,
there among the scattered October
and coping saws were your broken promises,
the chrome bumper you mowed
that terrible stranger down outside Philly
and now I think it's time I had a heart to heart
with my unfinished self
how nothing you could do made
me unlove you
how your newly upholstered sofa
dangled our legs just so
to Old Dirty Bastard
how we laughed so hard
I thought we'll never breathe again
for a day, a year, forever.

Yvonne Amey holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Central Florida. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Bending Genres, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, Vine Leaves Journal, and elsewhere.

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