Amber Flora Thomas
Yellow Grass Ascent
Soon the black dog with tan markings will race over the rise,
bound through blades toward its name, be at your heel smelling ravaged.
Blood ravaging. A hollow tears: one two (distances). The farmer
aims a shotgun in the yellow grass. Spikelets clusters
cluck against his jeans and drowned quiet in the blasts. Panorama of a road
bordered by redwoods and a farmhouse with green shutters.
We don’t think of the farmer as beautiful sinew, massaging
his calluses after a bath, but he is growing grief inside muscle.
Inside teeth: a place for the dog bounding through yellow grass
before you give up and stop calling.
Inside the sheep: grasses.
Inside the dog: blood of grasses.
He crosses the field, gun pointed. Crickets rebound. Face hid by brim shadow,
neither white or black, as it should be. Grass almost to his waist,
he leaves a seam going toward the injured sheep and the dead dog
with more killing to do.
Butterfly Garden
Learning to exit under threat,
Blue Morpho migrate toward the plexiglass
on Canal Street. Escape evaded again
by a seduction of plastic Morning Glory
and Bird of Paradise, tasting
reductions of oil and dye. “Do not
feed the butterflies.”
The sanctuary damages dusting,
so wings are scalloped in their gaze.
In the tropics above a koi pond,
arrested sapphire
fascinates the room,
legs knead an opaque stamen.
Before extinction, the disappearances
are known as “relaxing”,
numbers portend erasure. As we wait
in the passage, the automatic warning:
“Check yourself for butterflies” repeats.
Her blouse of embroidered butterflies
ignites laughter. A seamstress
for the planet, recovering
the dying on the threshold of death;
images prized for likeness.
We walk through the gift store
to leave. Blue Morpho pinned to satin
in a black box for $39.99. Arched-winged
Cattleheart. Great Eggfly. The garden
windows sweat gold and green.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water: Poems which was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her other books include, The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and Red Channel in the Rupture: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in The New England Review, Tin House, Ecotone, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Third Coast, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Thomas has taught at the Cave Canem annual retreat and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Sewanee Writers Conference. She earned an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She was born and raised in northern California. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.