Amanda Kay Writes

   it has been far too long since I’ve visited I have become a mamá I have become an abuela la vida but now it is time to come home come home to my madre montaña   I round a bend in the road and there she is erect, beaming with an excited smile tree skirts ruffling soft, wooden flesh trembling she beckons to me, arms wide a beacon among the foothills and I come to her   she is exactly as I remember her glamorous as a goddess forthright like a toddler a bewitching sea spooking the most weathered sailor a snuggly breeze rocking the baby to sleep each creek, stream, river a stitch in her patchwork quilt every meadow and valley a square with a forgotten tale every tie-off a hermit town too sleepy to wake up and greet me she is stuffed with mineral marrow and edged with snowflake seams   I can feel her insides the weight of a glacier covers her bosom like all good mamás she has given her quinta e...

  today I leave the forest and return to the desert an old blues singer playing slide on my front porch   today I leave seclusion and return to togetherness food poisoning from a shoddy Chinese food restaurant   today I leave fantasy and return to reality a grumpy ogre pouting around the forest kicking birds   today I leave my vacation and return to my works a strung out marionette grinning through the role of a lifetime   today I leave the big sky and return to the dusty earth a nameless pauper in an unmarked, shallow grave

droning boat motors bookending the lanky lake and its library of trees     the pitter patter of little waves       pencil on paper     scritch, scratch, scritch, claw, scribble,     scritch, scratch, scritch         the mope, flop, mope of teenage waves                                              two boys and a mama on a dock                the plomp of rocks into water         the clomp of boots to a newly discovered dock!         the slomp of boots back from the newly discovered private dock…          ...

  I roll down the window and stick my arm out the sun of the day strikes my arm with lightning bolts of electricity charge to my belly bursting from me hysterically like fireworks I stick my head out and turn my face to the sky hair whipping around my face wildly laughing eyes full of sun drops   I roll down the window and stick my arm out the rain of the day assaults my arm like gunshot rolling a cannonball into my belly sinking me deep like a routed ship I stick my head out and turn my face to the sky hair sticking to my face soberly tired eyes full of rain drops

lay me down in the rain speckled grass arms spread wide legs spread wider eyes following the pines to the overcast sky every pore  tingling every cell spasming the smell of moth-eaten particles and pollen spritzing through my nostrils my lungs permeating with grizzled smoke filling my veins with spores, semen, and sap every dew drip low bird call snap of a twig a symphony, a lullaby microorganisms, minerals, soil, roots reach up to pull me under we fertilize one another wolfish secret lovers She and I a deer wanders by and eats grass out of my mouth kissing me thoroughly as she does I kiss her back with a sloppy french kiss transmitting communion  between core and sky

a field full of glacial debris mammoth boulders too smooth and round to climb irritating pebbles that get stuck in your shoe unusable land dusty, peeling chilling   a farmer with an ice melting smile muscular body piling up rocks in funeral pyres rough hands clearing and repurposing the land fertilizing words sunny, shielding tilling   a bed ready for spring planting newly sown seeds striving with the freshly turned soil infant seedlings embracing the cloudless sky green, organic kisses leafy, yielding thrilling

  dawn peekaboos over the horizon stirring the sky with navel orange and pink lady apple cotton candy dotted with whipped cream sprinkled with birds and abandoned dreams   a pompous sunbeam breaks through the trees antsy to awaken the day for adventure   let the night owls sleep for just a moment pretty please, if you don’t mind   theirs is the rapidly fleeing sunset stirring the sky with villainous violets and red light district neon splashed with the ocean’s depths and the harvest moon’s slow rise to authority