by Amanda Auchter

 

Tear down the fence, and watch
as the yard becomes a field.

Walk the yellow
buttercups, the blue morning

glories. There will be mosquitoes
at your ankles.

Some will leave red welts,
but this is a voice

in the distance
chewing its way through

your tenderness. Touch
the tree charred by lightning.

This is you. This is how
you will come to be: fragile,

firestruck, fieldwalker.
You hold the sun’s bright

blaze, a snapdragon
between your fingers.

 

 

 

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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 has appeared in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, HuffPost, CNN, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a book reviewer for Indianapolis Review and Rhino Poetry. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram as @ALAuchter.