red booth

review

issue 7vnteen















 

 Hosts
 
Savannah:  night’s steam just 
beginning.  In our talk, stories of ex-
lovers like the ghostly hover 
of bread.  Rising above us,
they body forth old raptures:
 
your French sculptress opening 
minute doors and cantilevers 
into being.  To free her, you merely slept –
mouth prone— beside her. 
I cried at your goodbye
to the Finnish one: an offhand
wave as the classroom door shut.
 
Then me: having to dream a resolution—
the old lover shows me a photo
of all his exes; like a family reunion
we name our mean aunts, the cruel
duplication of icy fathers,
our insufficiencies, a progeny 
we call loss.  
 
Hungry or not, we savor
the ghosts.  Watch as they eat
the air between us.

- Amy Pence
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

Amy's online chapbook is "Skin's Dark Night" to be found at www.2river.org/chapbooks. 

She has work forthcoming in New American Writing and Sleeping Fish.  She lives near Atlanta with her nine-year-old daughter, Ada, and has appeared in RBR before.
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