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the poet
Amantine Brodeur is a literary alchemist seeking out the universes inside words. Her work can be found at paragraph planet, Pink Plastic House, 100 Words of Solitude, Black Bough Poetry – Deep Time (Vol 1). Forthcoming in Thrice Fiction later this year are two commissioned pieces: her surreal short fiction The Anaphora House, and her poem in four acts, In a Scattering of Tongues, on the women in the works of Samuel Beckett. She's currently at work on a novella, due out in 2021.
the poems
Body Standing
I leave
his body standing;
the preserve
of collaborative paper.
Disorder.
Entrances. Words.
An ease of Uncertainties.
And then redemptive
emptying out of memory.
Along this landscape
of prayer, his lines suffer
their partial evidence.
Purpose. Breathing.
Rivers drawn.
Invasions dissolved.
Standing. Layers. Later,
much later,
Bodysilt.
Holding Space
Once upon a time, where The Bosporus imbued the Marmara Sea,
our dense salinity rose upward. In this rich up-swelling we drank up
all our silt. Like laundry, we spread our lives openly breasted to the
wind and tall trees, our dyed sails ripped and unstitched.
The remains of our wooden ships, unmasked in this wild stillness.
In this vertical motion of water and lint, we’re holding fast along darker
edges, turning salt into air, and us into a study of porous water.
Jalopy Poison
You lark the heart of my frivolous wing; beat the soar
of my day, dark – and wondrous. You play discordant
against love’s laughter. You line the shore, gull-cawed
to fishing the tackle of our mindplay: Pretending the
afternoon’s cool swagger into dusk against the tide, when
the sun slides deep into the awe that floors me. You hip
the jilt of poppy stems, red, to become my jalopy poison.
You are my proposition hazard, you’re the In-between of
Auden and ice-cream: The string to trip my fall. You’ve
become my voyage across God, into Reason ...
and none at all.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb