Amanda Auchter
IMAGINARY SON: WATER
I could say there was a flood
and my body the boat that kept you
safe. But my body was only temporary,
and would buckle come morning.
I would let you live in each part of me:
eyelid, elbows, clavicle. But now you
are being held by the fluorescent ether
like a bowl, a bird, a wailing god. You
take your first damp breath. This is all
yours. Your own splendid body.
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She lives in Houston, TX