Amy Miller
Poetry is the horse jumping the pasture gate. You trained it, you taught it so carefully to jump those fussy little fences, and here it rewards you by bolting off to parts unknown. If you’re lucky, people will see it running and say, “That is one badass crazy horse.”
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After Heavy Snow, February
My bootprints
back and forth across the yard
mingled with
a dog’s
he burst in
through the pickets’
back gap
black lab
white chest
head up
and
head-
long
stopped
to poop in a corner, saw me
standing there
holding a saw
over the dead
limb
of birch that took
the fenceboard down
he fixed me
with both eyes
ran
back out
into the pines
For the Ladies
“For sale: sanders, lathes, jointers, electric motors.
And for the ladies: household items, quilts, and furniture.”
—garage sale ad
Free weights, dumbbells.
Small bottles of solvent.
A 12-gauge and 200 clays.
A pickaxe with a shaky head.
A trench, a row, a rivulet.
A block and tackle.
Your very own barn.
A cliff, a rope, a fallen bird.
Ten thousand pounds of pressure.
A long, feathered night at the Lay-Z Inn.
A baby, no accessories.
Twenty-seven years in Lompoc.
A personalized semi-personal love song.
A trip you were asked not to take.
A treeline and a trail.
Warm stones in your sleeping bag.
All of Alaska.
The cliff you were told not to climb.
The climbing.
Lady’s-Slipper
After we fought
you brought me an orchid
small balloon
like a frog’s throat
frozen
we were in
a deep
green
wood
wires
of nettles and brambles
it’s illegal to pick them,
you said,
the flower floating
severed
surprised
on a brown stem
as if
you would
kill
you would bend
the law
into
a locket
and leave it
in a red box
inside
my screen door
at dawn
you did that
once
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Amy Miller’s poetry has appeared in Bellingham Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Spillway, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. She has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and the 49th Parallel Award, and won the Poetry Storehouse First Anniversary Contest for videopoems and the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland. She works as an editor and publications manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.