Two from: Songs From Quarantine Bay – Amantine Brodeur

Where Readers Weep

In this second city of Becoming, at the surge of the sea, with the deep heartwood
of its rogue canon, lithographic sugarbirds, slender and exquisite, at the edge of ink,
gather among first lines, between the It of paperbacks, down the spines of verbal worlds,
of poems split aghast by mouths with unquenchable thirst for lyrical naked words
waiting to step into vicarious wonder, in the profundity of our profane loves and the sacred
art of an invented ‘Everything’.

In that second-hand breath, when the storm ceases just long enough to swallow all
that pale Paludrine, warding off Malaria for a different day, shadows fling their weight
into the sound; wild winds and thrown surf, in its muscular grip on a throat, like wild
vines stood in silence, memory tight and trembling before the moment of bolting into
some outward blue; bones of some stranger hung out to dry, once accomplished, and
now no longer any direction to take, for all the logic simplicity of an Escape: At the cool
altitude of mutiny, a voice with no laughter in its eyes,

“You will take my advice,
if you are wise and do likewise. . .”

In this second leave-taking of resentful eyes, unflinching in all that talk of truth
and insinuation; and in the inevitable aftermath of ‘Old Apathy’, the girl with truant hips hitches
her ride to Tanganyika in search of her unaffected, laughing sky, finding instead,
a bewitching, beguiled sweet bachelorhood of proposition, strung like beaded salt,
across bare shoulders, left in the empty seat of an abandoned affair; whisked from foam
in their warm dark of vaguely savage sundowner parties, swift in its borrowing of love.  

Sliver

She stands
in
the rain,
a sliver
of rice paper
between
the sheets
blistering
the wet grass
and
her bare
feet.
She stands
untitled,
un-nameable
between
a blistering
and the blare
of
being grassed.
no
foothold.
She stands
bared,
a sliver of
grass
in the ruins
of –
sleet.

---

Bio: Amantine Brodeur is a reclusive literary alchemist; an explorer of the mundane and ordinary, revealed in universes hidden within language. A lover of satire and the absurd, she embraces the surrealist irony of contemporary life. Her work has been published in online presses including iamb, Pink Plastic House, Ice Floe Press and others. Her work is included in the anthology Deep Time (Black Bough). Her collaborative text, 100 Words of Solitude published by (Rare Swan Press). Her poetry collection, Falling Slowly, is published with (Book Hub Publishing, 2021).

Banner Art: Postcard from the Skies, a vispo by robert frede kenter (c) 2024. Twitter: @frede_kenter; IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22.