“To forget how you tasted those leggy afternoons when our bodies spilled like wine across the floor, is to admit a hawk into the house. Is to wring a rag of water. When I’m in the thicket with my smaller hungers, I don’t need to know every cave and what it stores, cool and damp, for you. I don’t need to know how many nests are lined with your hair. There’s nothing tame about twilight, this old song shaking the sweetgum leaves— when I thirst I dream like a violin waiting the bow.”
— Amie Whittemore, from “Nocturne,” Birmingham Poetry Review (no. 49, Spring 2022)