109

we shall give, says father

xxxxxxxxxxxxOf a family, we are able to respond as unit—a van of stooges ready to converge on a neighborʼs doorstep with silly string and pumpkin muffins. To give is an attainment at which we shall arrive by virtue of extension. We “dial” another. The verb reflects an antiquated clockface, a disc of time eternally linked to the sunʼs passage. The circle got replaced like light over the horizon with numbers—nearer to human rows and columns, business, the need for speed. Economy is the opposite of gifting, but that calculated future is still ringing through the devices, rounding us back to what our immediate members have passed on and what the next will partake of us, avants en-garde the golden curve of consciousness.

   166

they say Leda once found a hyacinth-colored
egg hidden  xxxxxxBut not Leda. What need has she for congratulations who comes upon the stony internal bloom?    87E

]] queen]]

 xxxxxxThere is one vessel not yet upturned—the mouth filled with commendation.

____Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of two chapbooks, Farm (Finishing Line Press: 2010) and There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man (Apostrophe Books: 2009). The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip won the 2012 Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest and is expected in June. Her prose and poetry appears or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia.