Three poems by Amy Jo Trier-Walker
Bendy Paper Hands Living:
At ice houses a little fishbone affects me as I think of the long December cat on my December bones
What old holed tarps think at heart I do not know, yet her plastic wounds at night water me
Prescribed canals shatter me, solar ash birds lighten; in a rift in the line, fadeless, a curtain suffers
Wicked: like the aspen’s sleeping crow on wings adrift in wound, how my days pass by
When they break the water in hoses for rambling, at the end of knees of creek, a hand rises
Ladder Living:
Near my ice fishing, only A chords of birches who, gathering bones, often come and go
Now should I find myself confined in a flipped, five-gallon bucket, my spring thick with
The bell round the neck vying through a hole at the backseat, down from light’s feather teeth, a mushroom gill’s voice
No one visits this slag heap; the timber rising from the bog-swallowing thunderstorms’ saws sees it first
Little whirring teeth village: ferns’ voices ceaseless on aspirin, amid tin I miss moaning the smoke below
Darling Button Living:
Rotting’s fumes of the past melting still in the cards; it’s snow on one side in a child’s winter
Galoshes deep, winced door is unaware of roots: on it, intermittently dripping, barreling, marrow pea-winds
The roof faded, and breakfast is first roost: its window suggests elsewhere in the bread
Pile of floor: a rowing boat’s skips in the coughings also makes such a spring retract, retrace
The rim of straying eyelid jitters at dawn, just out of the dirt a blister’s single glove
Note: These poems are chimeras that combine the tankas of Princess Shikishi (Japanese Women Poets, East Gate 2008, translated by Hiroaki Sato) and Abraham Smith’s Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books 2014).
Amy Jo Trier-Walker is a tree and herb farmer in Indiana and the author of a chapbook, Trembling Ourselves into Trees, which is forthcoming from Horse Less Press in 2015. Her work can also be found in or is forthcoming from Forklift, Ohio, Handsome, LEVELER, Word For/Word, and Timber, among others, and she is the Poetry and Art Editor at Black Tongue Review.