by John Amen
Your phone rang, someone said the baby was just born, you said who is this? We had wandered for hours, trudging Divisadero, frozen under a red awning as it started to hail. You were packing for your month-long retreat. I was prepping for my trek through the trenches of Los Angeles, the battlefields of the Colorado Rockies. I gazed down that long straight sloping street & saw death crawl onto the wharf, shaking his thick matted fur. I cupped my hands, whispered a name, I don’t recall now what it was but I knew it then, the word rolled to the water & sank with a splash. It seemed like years, you were still standing in the corridor of the Airbnb with the light off repeating who is this? who is this? Night dropped & the week ended & a lifetime too. We were a few steps from the cold waves I would’ve sworn were miles in the distance.
John Amen’s latest collection, Dark Souvenirs, was published by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine.
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