Amy Fetzer Larakers

It begins in anise
and ends in Asheville

these things we call homes               skins & plywood, insignificant fabric

minor tones that sing                         inside our heads. Paper bags filled

with artichoke, papaya                     a loud humming. The beginning was

small                               of failed namings                        forget-me-nots splashing

petals down our throats.                       The weeds grow in thicker

next to the highway                            a warning or a slow glowing. Mornings

seem like ours, quite quiet                  white nothings. We push strollers

loaded down with cans                      of black-eyed peas. The road keeps being

black. A strip of licorice.                    A long lonely taste.

The Days

when I forget my name, I call myself yellow. A shade of glisse, a smooth

former edge. In the mirror, a marimba with china red hair, alabaster neck that

seems like yesterday. I bend, crooked and long. Reach my fingers out the frosted

window to the pigeons on the roof. The cooing is what I hear before I sleep at

night, when I wake in the dark. I think "someday I will know that I wanted

edgy shins" or "then we will all have bird baths and smoky doves". But I know

that there will always be mornings, feathers that hurt, and small voices that

call me mother.

(again) Another Day

after Brigitte Byrd

Like the one before but blacker and with less familiarity. The boy seemed the

same. But how could she know. He played tricks on her with alarming

consistency. Sometimes a lovely tooth. A star. A bit of fruit. Other mornings there

were bells and knuckles that mocked like the sea, a temptation of white wicker

and rivulets in the sand, good boys that kissed their mothers at night. So she

said goodbye to her markets, her cracked bricks, the birds that lived under the

roof. As she left they threw bits of string and called out to her, the echo

of a cuckoo buried in the falling snow.

Amy Fetzer Larakers lives in Wheaton, IL with her husband and two children. She has a Master’s degree in Poetry from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has taught as an adjunct writing instructor in the GOAL program at North Park University. Her poetry has been published in Near South.