Amy King

WOULD IT BE RUDE OF ME TO SAY

I like the length of your body 
since I've never leaned into it?
The look of your clavicle
without having traced it? 
To say I want to find places
on your terrain, without hands, 
in which you reverberate
through me?
Instead, I'll say I like the way 
your hair is growing 
and leave the subtlety of question  
to shape the intimacy of air
in the spaces between us.

WOMAN HITS HOME

            AFTER LEONORA CARRINGTON

I’m full of myself having
filled myself this afternoon
on her hyenas, her obsidian 
charges, her zebras in dresses 
on hind legs at tea. What
is it like to be painter, 
a lady painter, an oxymoron
who paints from the freedom 
Mexico has given her escape
from gilded old England who
albatrosses her neck? She 
surrounds herself with women,
a girl dressed down by men
who, in pigmented prowess, 
is a dog in the night to be put down
despite the pharmekon’s poison 
into antidote driven. Boys aren’t 
trained to see the open windows 
she presents in vision, Shiva’s chaos
given form with her strokes, 
constructive if only he would 
give a little into love
and connection
without prerequisite resistance.

Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize winner. She’s co-editor of the anthology Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change and the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry. King is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. https://amyking.org/