Read Me Like Braille
A bath so good, I’ll type it out.
But why do you prick
the nerves at the water’s horizon?
Such places do exist,
noted or kissed,
cued in or clueless.
I’m riding bubbles,
holding the soap, believing in children
and calling you
names deep into the mailbag’s destiny.
This letter always calms
me though, the part about how we
grow up. How we beat
childhood disease and meet somewhere
between the past and present future.
We fly to LA,
go to the Louvre,
sometimes as far as
Asian places, Thailand via Hong Kong,
the Wailing Wall to Budapest.
We are exotic beasts,
more beast than koala heartbeats.
I faint. I fruit.
I shrink into the apology of curtains’ pockets.
Never cause scenes,
take allergy meds,
work the wood of winter’s stove.
Six p.m. rows the loneliest hour,
even the paper cutter’s gone home.
I used to think
there was something of merit to incest,
a mystery of lineage that drew
the blood line
back to root, fondle
of scarf against the long throat
of genetics, but I grew jealous having
no kin, no one to lust
the tethers of my carrion,
cartilaged bones of legitimacy
and grew worn down
with the rotting cause of it all. The pinky’s cut
went numb. Even Hamlet
couldn’t persuade me to his mother anymore.
So here come the flames,
the final frontier
of possessing the one who doesn’t want
possession:
a washing off of skin with lathering habits,
the melting bones of humanity’s nest,
I’m a blackbird now.
I fly back to my stash of crackers,
sneak into your front
window, leave your bed by the night’s tattoo,
plunder other stomachs for nourishment.
Feed on me too,
I’m the cup
of anything as long as you read me like Braille,
my only simile
in this pile of wings: please
ride me home now, punctured with shadow.
–Amy King (appeared in ElevenEleven)
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
Your poem has largesse the size of continents, yes, your multitudes. I think of the European conquerors who claimed lands for their kings and queens and in contrast, your explorer bird who both serves and drinks from cups of braille so that we may feel new lands beneath our skins, of self and other. How brave and beautiful your voice, poet. It is a call to arms of love and loss and pain, without weapons. Thank you so much.
Wow, Donna – this comment is a poem unto itself!
Don’t know about that! but they are true words, inspired (as in the original Greek sense to breathe into) by your poem. I wanted to give you back something for having made and carried such a thing to this world. Beautiful.
Absolutely amazing. Great work!
Thank you, Barry!
Heh…one of those ones..where
I feel I like I’m cheating,
knowing the stones of your creak bed,
having run creak beds, darting.
A very lavish and sly jurnt…yes…
from the days of the instruments,
almost, but with stars.
!
I should hate this but I love it. Regardless it is dynamically wrote and here is a bow to the genius of it.
Thanks, but why hate it?