Amanda Auchter: Two Poems

Eden | Bluebeard's Last Bride

Eden

Nights your fingers circle the blue
thorn patch. Your mouth

at my side says nothing. Count
the willows, the green-struck leaves,
the tipped stars. We sleep in

the wood grove, your back to the snake-
branched tree, the riverbed. You fill

everything: my neck's damp hollow,
knotholes, the moon's sorrowed face.
You have said my breath begins

inside you, each of my slivered bones,
my hair, my lips. All winter

I have searched for myself in other things —
stone, red earth, honeycomb.
You mention the outside, its rawness.

Death, I believe in that, think of the desire
between us, of my want — the char-lit sky,

the mountains, how each echo is an end
we cannot live without.

Bluebeard's Last Bride

Having come to the closet door, she considered
what unhappiness might attend her.

— from Folktales

We never speak of this not-room: the door,
its plated keyhole, the black eye, the hour-

glass mouth. He calls for it in sleep: forgive me
these sins, my daily kills. I've dreamed

of other women — gold bands on their fingers,
stained lips, bruised eyes. Tonight, the house

is silent. Each chair slumbers in the shadow
where he left it. His heavy jackets, his draped

mirrors. Each sound is a footfall, a voice, his
breath at my neck. I touch the eyehole fitting

and the brass doorknob. This key in my hand
calls back the dead — those women, those bodies,

hands, lips sewn shut. Wedding veils, white
dresses, slips. Here, this little closet

of death. How alone each wanders, how
out of tune. Their hips sing from each rafter

hook. Blood lilies, a purpled throat, a mouth
full of locks. Their flat red bodies

open to nothing. Even that word: not a thing.
Let me leave this glory be: one prayer, one

resurrection. Hand, eye, the far star
of each pupil, a shatter of grace.

Poet's Biography:

Amanda Auchter is the editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of Light Under Skin (Finishing Line Press, 2006). She is the recipient of the 2005 Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Prize from Harpur Palate and the 2005 James Wright Poetry Award from Mid-American Review. Her poetry appears in Born Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, The North American Review, and elsewhere. She is completing her manuscript, Illuminati, under the direction of Claudia Rankine.