Amelia Martens

Mid-Winter, Far West Kentucky

I am a series of ghosts;

the bones in my ankle creak

my ascent and descent

each stair, a platform

to perform new human

transcendence, or rest.

From the backseat

our daughters discuss

how many children

can fit in the heart

of a blue whale, how

all blood is blue until

it comes out of you.

The light is yellow

as I transport us

through the inter-

section, over ice.

My mind fixed

on microfossils,

the bits of teeth

and skeletal splinter

of manta rays found

shattered in the desert.

It turns out two

children can fit

into the heart.

They ask me to play

the song about trains.

---

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four poetry chapbooks. In 2021 she was awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in 2019 she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

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