A Poem By Megan Amram

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Ice Queen

5 a.m. (4 a.m. EST)

The island from above
Became a hook, gesturing.
Filled with sounds,
The shape of three fingers.

The family, bereft,
Witness to the 5 a.m.
The bruise-colored money left.
The motorcade on the left.

The slit, a haiku:
Focused, deep as a tap.
To stab a man,
To write a haiku.

Crimson almost-morning:
The abettor.
Bermuda has
One more flower.

I could feel the gushing of morning coming on.
The road acted its role admirably.
I was a visitor in an intimate land of hand-violence.
The sky was a place of water-stitched clouds.
The houses were each colored like a type of Bermuda wound.
You juggled the affliction of the parking lot passing,
The gift of being native to somewhere.

The cricket song stabbed the night, black as the soles of my feet.
I paid to touch down here, to view the throbbing iguana.
I enjoy my subtropical epiphany, that people die in Bermuda.
I bested the palm’s best frond.
I was an hour older than myself.
The flowers shattered the silence of the monochrome,
The unfinished cathedral of St. Catherine.
And I see the drink in the air, I see the breeze sagging with storm,
I note it all, I note the shadows of the palms, lazy, tanning;
I note the white bones of the gravestones and
the whiter bones below.

Megan Amram is a graduate of Harvard University and comedy writer living in Los Angeles.

Poems poems poems, we’re busting out all over with poems. You may contact the editor at [email protected].