Amber Flora Thomas Poems

The ice splits over Blackfoot River. A moose comes
off the mountain to walk the avenues and neighborhood dogs
register their wildest complaints. Dry air. Dry want.
...

I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.
Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust
crumbled. You push me back into bed.
...

Loan me your best shovel. I will dig the hole.
This earth is soft. I kick it with my boot
and it chips up. See, the hole is already started.
...

To the conjurer of rabbits out of black hats, the escapist
down to his final act of vanishing beneath fifty pounds of chains,
you are born. To his legacy of tricks and Houdini-style
metamorphosis just waiting to spin out
...

I turn the dress loose—its hand-sewn collar,
its seven bodice buttons, the hem's frayed edge.
I follow each stitch as it slips
from its hold. I'll reconcile with time later
...

Light clouded, a nighthawk cuts
across the last threads, as though what can be seen clearly—
your foot cupped in my hands, the growing veins
...

The worry has a form like when
red-winged blackbirds leave stalks
in your field. Those minor flashes of red:
trouble. The mayhem goes east, returns west,
...

I've memorized its heart pounding into my thumb.
Breath buoys out. My fingers know how to kill,
closing on the bird's slippery head.
...