Amy Beeder

Amy Beeder Poems

Amy Beeder Biography

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006). A new book, Now Make An Altar, will appear from the same press in early 2012. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and other journals. She has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, and a Witness Emerging Writers Award. She teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.)

The Best Poem Of Amy Beeder

Tetanus

Agony the wax-white man in spasm, arched
arms tight as flightless wings, rigid fists on ribs
in Bell's famous painting Opisthotonus. This
is how swift toxins knit the bony fibers, blight

the spine's fluid; how our haven is invaded by
needle, nail, fish hook, the rusty still-sharp edge
of plow or handsaw. Here are the spores & here

the porous nerves that make a net for crossing.
The cord cut with a dirty shard. The mourning.
The tiny dialogues that bind our fate, all muscles
taut across the long adrenal squall. Now a cursory

search reveals C. tetani as a random scatter: tiny
rods under the lens, bright dice; as shining piles
of clattered tiles thrown down in games of chance.

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