Amy Small-McKinney

Amy Small-McKinney’s third chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, written during Covid after her husband’s death, is forthcoming with Glass Lyre Press, 2022. For the 2020 virtual AWP, she co-moderated an interactive discussion, Writing Through Grief & Loss: The Intersection of Social and Personal Grief During Covid. Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Towards Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, Connotation Press, Cortland Review, Ilanot Review, Indianapolis Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tiferet, and SWWIM, among others. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate. Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian, and her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. She resides in Philadelphia.

A Widow Travels to an Art Museum

The train’s window cloudy as cataracts.Slowly, my body returns to me.Though Rodin’s Genius of Eternal Rest is without head and arms, nothing essential is missing. He dares sorrow, leans into it. Nothing is lost in Neel’s Self-Portrait, her breasts resting flat against her belly. Green shading: she’s draped in earth. Blue tension outlines her: the sky out lines her. I sit with her for a moment in the striped chair. Rise alone. I am beginning to accept what I have lost. Blue leans into me like new love.

Amen

Silence moved from sanctuary to hell when alone she listened for breathing outside her door
 I understand
Except no one expects hell to be beautiful
Faint snow’s falling
A teacup the colorof a scarlet macaw Lily candles perfume my exhausted room
These offerings—their sweetbenign ignorance—Thank you, universe, I almost forgot

Perfect Violins

The eclectic science of acoustics investigates the atmosphere of stars, the mysteries of hearing, the technology of detecting secret nuclear tests, the architecture of boiler factories and concert halls
The same fingers that counted worms for customers at their family bait store on the bayalso mastered violins.The shop by the boats dockedwobbling and roped. The bloodworms’pale skin permitting hemoglobin to turn them creamy pink. Parapodium outspreadingfrom their bodies.
The violin’s body is hollow.The bow drawn all along its strings, the stringsonce made from sheep intestines, or from insidegoats or cows.Everything perfect, everything heartless.
You told me this. Bloodworms can bite, and their jaws are filledwith copper, unnoticed in other living organisms. Still, the family packed them wrigglinginside a moist container, fully alive to lure the fish.The three sibling violinists became the ConcertoSoloists, dove into Vivaldi, Haydn’s Water Music,and Benjamin Britten inside a church’s perfect acoustics.
Somewhere in all of this, I return to worms,as they will return to us one day, not knowing their fates wait on the tip of hooks, or feeding, if lucky, on our decay. You, my newlover, walked into my life as though I heard you coming.
Note: From Perfect Violin: Does Artistry Or Physics Hold Secret? by Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times, June 14, 1994

What Is The Word For Returning?

If I say it, will anyone believe me?Not resurrection—I don’t believe someone rises from the dead. Not compass,
though it might rhyme with yes, a slow yes,like the baobab tree blooming every fifty years.How long have I been closed? How long
have I cared for the dying: mother, father, husband?Decades, decades my own body left silent.I don’t mean gilgul—no second chances inside another,
or dybbuk—no rest from transgressions, but hauling this same body, this same heart, finally unbolted, a baobab flower opening at night.
This is what I want to say: When a body, wearyand ragged and hopeless mourns, then returns, it’s allowed to consider something like rebirth,
the self’s surfacing, a yes, at the very least.

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