Amanda J. Stewart is a two-time graduate of Winthrop University and an alumna of Chi Omega Fraternity. She currently resides in Charleston, SC, where she works for MUSC in addition to teaching English at two local colleges. She is also the proud mother of two cats, MJ and Maggie.
Manuscript Title: Leaving and Dying
March Triumvirate
You’re three babies bornone spring:
two whose birthdays I calculated
and found right near yours.
They are yeasty ghosts
hungering, lingering inside you.
One day perhaps you will find
yourself too full to breathe
- just for a moment –
they will visit.
Three due dates
seven years
one month
two decisions
and a third not made.
Hardly coincidence.
Surely
some secret mating season
some Aramaic Egyptian
holy something
on one abacus
and finally you
rolling forth
disguised, pink, crying, perfect.
We all thought you one baby.
One April night I woke up
after three,
remembered
you but a triplet
of seven lucky years.
Two Tomatoes
Last night I fell in love with the produce man.
His careful beard
sang my name in its unity
of small sharp hairs
and his smile arranging limes
made me ache for this man
- a no one in particular –
this man I certainly don’t love
and could never fall into lust with.
But he’s not you
has got that facial hair I hate
and rejoice that you don’t have.
He’s a new name face job place
and I still love you.
Something so full and firm and scary
about our fit
makes me almost want
to buy some fruit.
Messages from the god of Ngong (to me, age eleven)
Daddy is a prophet,
Peter Kamau Mwangi
encoding the holiness
of His word.
Little brother is a baby
by ounces;
sisters stand on stick legs,
look helplessly at falling hair,
watch skin dry and fall away.
The miracle began on Christmas;
we were the geese
that followed him -
four sisters;
one brother;
me;
mother a minor prophet.
It was Christmas when the water began to flow like wine
(and nothing more),
then when we saw the glimmerings of the prophecy,
tasting it vaguely instead of the dinners and breakfasts and lunches -
but with the haze came the clarity,
the reason in the garbled messages:
hungry is another word for sin.
But the outsiders cannot understand
that we satiate ourselves on air,
that even without the university
and the throne at our hollow human table,
that even caged and ranting,
Daddy is a prophet.
A boy after two girls?
A girl after three boys
and I’ve always had to contend with
plastic guns and miniature
motored objects of all varieties.
Learned to swim
head-first deep-end of a dark lake.
Long I’ve waited for
pink and gentle
and powder to fall carefully around.
But I don’t paint nails
fingers or toes
and here it is
a manicure for Christmas.
A gentle bunny
with quiet white fur,
a rabbit who takes bubble baths,
but your teeth are pulled
and sometimes I like a carrot.
News of a Death
I was ambushed at dawn,
drawn up from cooling covers with the details:
your final breaths imagined in around crevices of
crunched metal and panicky, calm, lingering thoughts
posited in around the official report from the officer at the door.
What I knew:
You wouldn’t return.
What I knew:
You had thought of me at that final moment,
no,
had known that morning when you left
and still said nothing, let me kiss you distracted
goodbye,
knowing,
knowing
I’d regret it and wish myself back to our kitchen
every morning
until I joined you
until someone signed to unplug me and let
machines exhale
slowly
until
I was ready for the box or
until an officer tapped firmly some other dark morning
at another door -
a child I might have with
a poor excuse for you,
you years in the ground,
waiting, or even
until I sat alone in the kitchen,
by the drawer with pens arranged by color and size,
listened to the phone ringing for days, dimmed the lights,
ran to meet you in the rising cloud of smoke.
Passenger Seat
It feels good,
but most of all it feels wrong –
fumbling through,
a burning pyre of dark reds:
shame, desire.
And after all there is my baptism,
of the Southern ilk;
Yes: born and bred.
(Though mama would say
Baptists don’t breed but
procreate for Jesus.)
I look back a lot
through the darkness of those dusks,
through piney-fresh armor-alled
date night carnival rides
to a fresh and shimmering circle of hell.
In late-night drinking games,
I learn the names for my sins.
Perry, GA
for JKWThey pulled over for miles
on both sides of the road:
They knew it was you
riding through in a long dark car
on a bright day
when it should have rained like hell.
A nice gesture
on a hot dark road
on a sunny quiet
lazy day, and
I think it would
have made you proud
and beaming quietly.
Not quite a week before
you told your
brethren and sisters
“You have to be ready to go at any time.”
And you were:
a leader by example
of those words
and many more unspoken
absorbed by babies
and dogs
and even graying men and
falling young ladies over
your bright shining years.
There were no skid marks
on the dark road
on the bright clear day
a few days before this
pilgrimage in black.
There were none either
in your life, no
starting & stopping,
just
moving breathlessly and
laughing, a trip of delight and awe: you
arching always toward this day that nearly
killed us all and took us
with you
(to a place you’d
after all
been ready for from the start).
Son of a Vegetarian
He sure bites a lot to be
the son of a vegetarian, they said.
And he did, too.
Took the little pieces of flesh,
brushed with the salty
breezes of living & invisible to the naked eyes
of everyone else,
stored them up in molars,
below his tongue,
way back in his throat.
By the time he was five
he refused to brush his teeth.
Old women the color
of falling leaves and mahogany
covered in dust
tucked their tongues behind false teeth,
raised pruney fingers to spanish moss hair,
wondered if chargrilled flesh from
the grill might have altered history
as it stood, if a toothbrush
and small steps like tuna salad sandwiches
or cubed ham in his omelettes still might.
Naw, they say,
that boy got teeth like a beaver, and
looks to be a dam-damning flood
coming to cleanse the carnage
of baby teeth hiding a man.
Your Mother’s Passing
The night you got the news
I held you for moments and
hoped that you’d come back before dawn,
back at least enough to be recognized,
if vanquished from recesses which if
plunged deep enough, far away,
one of us might not return
entirely ever.
After you held the coldest brass
on mahogany,
after the black parades in which
you shook too many other hands with
warm, warm skin,
we were together like the first night.
It was a night of despair
and it was the best night we had since the first.
I knew the remedy for the knifing ache:
to pour out despair like curdling milk
onto coarse cotton sheets.
We kicked the door back
into that first night,
long ago with living mothers
who weren’t there in that room.
Now when I think of the night we buried your mother
and the dawn we greeted panting after,
and I cannot remember it without thinking of
the honeymoon cruise;
can’t recall our wedding without the sharp dullness
of the sheets we
ripped coolly from the mattress,
Budget Inn, Macon.
Nuptial Musings
for N.R., June 11, 2004Let me know you well enough to put you in the ground
then never have to.
Show me things you hide from God
and the cat,
those flaws your children will inherit and shove in the closet
behind favorite jeans that no longer fit.
Let me have faith
through you,
spin selves in your irises,
consummate only to keep momentum with this mortal coil.
My hand is on your coffin,
my finger in your ring.
My breath is woven with yours and stopping because I see the final stop,
greet it in a black veil
that today these throngs see as white,
toast us and a future I dread and cherish.
I put my hand in yours,
do and will,
remember today so that I can forget for forty years or more,
until my hand lingers on amber wood warmed by a sinking sun,
when I can’t let go of a shell of something I’ve held deeper than my soul for decades,
when I dance alone with the memory of today and all the years between
and wait for another reception in white.
