2 poems
I would like to be everything and nothing all at once
The cattail stalks grazing their lean backs.
The shy canopy of trees that morse through roots, one endless organ.
To be the television slushed over with moss, expanding the plastic panels, rain-fogged glass.
Mucus layer of dirt, absorbing shards compacted in earth by the pound and pounds of rain, felled from the sky in one long blade.
To osmote that pain through stratosphere, skin.
Yet sometimes, contradiction : I want to be my mother.
Returning to coal country, her lilted tongue excavated from soil to the suction of her two front teeth.
The curvature of her body when it relaxes into a home it’s been excised from—easy, thoughtless.
To sluice through the membrane of my beliefs with a wet hand.
Then chrysalis back into skin, no scar, no seam.
Feeling anything but the two-ness of shame.
To press on Towamensing’s polluted bulge, and not be met with bloated burst, punctured sac.
Then to be that sac, its talc crust, multitude scatter of legs into an earth I cannot harm.
To be as whole as a molecule, already keyed into the structure of lignin, plankton, breath.
As nothing, too.
Scuttling chorus of : sky, sky, sky.
Implicated, absolved.
And at peace with the chance that forms it.
What Remains Unsaid with the Centralia Mine Shaft
—After Centralia, PA, which was condemned due to an underground mine fire that will continue for over 200 years
I can’t pretend I don’t know you
with your open ladder charred attempts
at containing combustion
the way you’re patched but sprawling inside
there’s a woman-ness to you
or rather I can’t pretend I haven’t known
a man drilling a place he doesn’t belong
words only hold so much like no or leave
they fluid between shale and disappear
never block anything at all that
steel-bit hands can’t get through
blood-bunched nails clipped low so I too
am tired of words disembodied voices
but what of your vocabulary
can my body borrow? when you talk about flame
do you say retribution or cleansing
as you burn for the next hundred years?
I want to speak myself back
in ecology with flesh
my fumes from a cold coat of muscle
my tongue stalactite
buds with monoxide
look at you your entrance now
a hut of rotting timber
entwined with weeds
ground murmurs the slow fuzz of dandelion
peeking over the crag
yes I too preferred to chalk
the body’s hold
beneath surface
and forego appearances the way you do
speak only in communion with seedlings
bird-dropped berries and mud
to pretend the past doesn’t
smoke-throat stoppered
as white sky balms
the sharp prongs of trees
here clouds wait to puncture or die out
whichever comes first
the landscape cracks apart
like a Renaissance fresco
smoking and spoken without being opened
for now
the quiet paints itself thick
while birds rest on the line
and refuse
to tear rain from its sleeve
Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, AMBIT, PANK, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her art has been supported by venues such as the Banff Centre, Target Gallery, Sound Scene Festival, and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. She has a Creative Writing MA from the University of East Anglia and is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech.