Briefly Incandescent
Kentucky-born poet Amelia Loeffler writes from the precipice between the wild recklessness of childhood and the quiet reflection of adulthood.
Amelia Loeffler poetry | Southern poetry | Nashville-based poet
PLAYING CHICKEN
I am thirteen and riding my bike
down the tracks, the train’s headlight
glowing like a distant moonrise.
I come to a clunking stop on the sleepers,
pick up a loose rail spike, bite it like a carrot
just drawn from soil, taste rust, iron and dirt.
A murmuration of starlings moves overhead
on a diagonal like the bow across its fiddle.
I swat a skeeter, flatten it under one palm.
The mangled body sticks in my arm hair:
tiny corpse, useless exoskeleton, two wings,
one slender mouthpart, all to waste.
I wonder, when the starlings swallow
mosquitoes, do they also taste night air
and that pearl of bug-drawn blood, bursting
cool against the gullet? Do they hunger
for it again, see me in the train’s nearing
spotlight, the pulse in my neck, blood
on one hand, and want to carry my body
off in a dark cloud of feather and beak?
The air horn sounds, I find myself
in the gravel alongside the tracks, bike
beside me, rail spike in my pocket, knees
skinned and bleeding, the train barreling on.
Amelia Loeffler poetry | Southern poetry | Nashville-based poet
Sublimation
Across the frozen lake: an old barn
raising its shadow above hoar-frosted
pasture where overgrown bluestem
bends under rime, its tin roof rusted,
wooden quilt square on the eastern face
lit almost anew in the mercurial dawn.
Ice-glazed tree, glossy in the foreground.
Just wait, as sun heats all this ice, the vapor
will hang above the lake, cling to branches,
condensation in flux like ghosts lingering
over their graves. As frost melts it will return
to the air in sublimating clouds: all this fog,
briefly incandescent, lit yellow and orange
in the daybreak, moving across the landscape
like low brushfire, will burn off by noon.
What’s ahead in the stagnant sun of midday:
the barn’s joists and beams heavy with dry rot,
scabs of hard dirt where grass won’t grow,
chest-high scar at the tree’s trunk where
I carved my name as a child, geese that keep
flying south, low enough in the sky that I can
see the sun’s sheen off dark under-wings
like glints off a puddle, spilled gasoline,
kaleidoscopic, shifting with the light.
Read an essay by Amelia Loeffler: “Into the Eye of the Dragon: Nada Tunnel’s Timeless Tale”
Amelia Loeffler is a born and raised Kentuckian currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry can be found inPoetry Magazine,Variant Literature, and The Chestnut Review.
