Amanda Hartzell

Quiet Anniversary

I’m not about to start loving in a way
that is really about forgetting.

It’s winter. So remote not even
wind can find us. Flour dusts

the table, the sky fills with planes.
I keep the list of what makes us alive

on my tongue, the brightness, the sour.
What good is gratitude if it splits a body

open and burns down the pretty house?
I count the planes. It’s cold enough

but I still know which number
you are, what miraculous arrival,

still let frost gather like a curious
touch on my year of flames.
  

Amanda Hartzell holds an MFA from Emerson College in Boston. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press, The Knicknackery, New Letters (where she is a past winner of the Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize), Paper Darts, and Petrichor Journal, among others.