Yvonne Amey
Aubade with Swimsuit & Coma Inside Newark Liberty Airport
When you land, Love, find me,
resting/writing/waiting for you.
I’m sitting just inside this quiet,
between Dunkin’s rising-sugar smell
& a helpdesk.
I’m writing a new poem
about bodies.
A glow-morning.
Its Indian Ocean.
How the waves, as I flew over them,
flaunted their ubiquitous, brackish-blue
one-piece.
I’m resisting an image here─
The years where I wouldn’t look at you. You
looked enough for the two of us.
No one ever told me the metaphor for marriage
was coma.
We’ve been married the length of my clean time;
My crack cocaine proclivity with a rich kid
whose only strength was resembling
a young, shirtless Dennis Wilson, and not you.
Unlike you, I would never marry me.
I’m resisting a concrete image here—
The one where you stood outside
the lip-blue line I drew
& told me I was beautiful.
Seventeen Side Effects That the Lunesta® Insert Doesn't Mention
Every poem you write will be a bird poem.
You will sign up for a $500 Ironman, though you don't swim, bike, or run.
You will wake your husband at 0330 to ask him, what's for dinner tonight?
You will wake in your car parked in your neighbor's driveway.
You will wake wearing grandma's wig.
Pirates will visit you.
You will call your brother at midnight asking him why he married Witchy Poo.
You will be blocked by your brother.
Eventually you will hate bird poems.
You will subscribe to a three-year subscription of Bombproof Your House.
You will group-text your parents thanking them for all the reasons you'll never reproduce.
You will miss your stripper years.
You will play with fire.
You will give CPR to a teddy bear.
You may experience vertigo, ghosts, heartbreak.
You may wake to blood splatter.
You may wake holding a gun.
Yvonne Amey is a poet and educator from Florida. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Pleiades, Hobart, Juked, and elsewhere.