1 poem
Ips Confusus
―most destructive to the piñon pine is this pest, the Engraver
Besieged by this author, the piñon bark parts,
the xylem surrenders & Ips,
thus crowned in rot & spoiled crop, prevails.
Not author. Scribe, ruinous scribe! His forewings
an insult, likewise his segments, ditto his luster
tunneled down that busy, busy blue-stain dark.
He has recorded a century’s weather in cul-de-sac
script: our hundred-year drought.
His miscreant scribble in its way accurate.
Crazed, yes, but oracular. Adamant, now
he’ll broadcast elixir, now with industry
fashion three trapdoor nuptial chambers;
three wives will arrive to his chemical song.
Damn his adamance, his galleys―
damn his palace that no snow will bear away this year.
Or next. The branches weep a black sap
while the creche stands provisioned
all for the replicas, legless & golden.
Confusus, engraver. Frass, his red hand.
Crush him: oddly, he’s balm. Smash him
to attar. Paste. Only something to paint with.
Amy Beeder's third book, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, came out from Tupelo Press in 2020. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award and a James Merrill Fellowship, she has worked as a creative writing instructor, freelance writer, political asylum specialist, high-school teacher in West Africa, and a human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review and other journals.