Poetry by Amy Trussell

 

 

Continuous Cooking

Its daylight

But you can see a tugboat half

Sunken into the moon's Sea of Serenity

Just beyond the back fence

 

The heart cooks continuously in its own juices

You can feel it if you walk with good carriage

Throwing botched records in the trash barrel

Pretending its the lip of a volcano

 

Light grafts itself to skin there

You turn to a coyote

Who skims over dust & leaves

Then disappears into butcher's broom

 

A spine glistens in the gully

With the meat eaten entirely off

You pause in descending pollen

That coats a shaft of light

 

Soon, nightfall

And the fireflies swarm torn drapes

In the empty house of your father

With feathered serpent on the lawn

 

 

 

stuffed blue galaxy

 

suspended above the porch:

part octopus, part lighthouse

field orbit of bird hunter

spores, plumes, creation fruit

torshad mesocyclone inside you

dress fire lot

cells star the flies that burn

the captured conceal a bearing green whale

chambered winds over blue vacant bank

central dates galaxy spreads extract

goat copper, gray training leaves

dark embrace of the twisting set

spinning cushion, place banked potential

in blue stuffed galaxy

spreading lemon meteors

blistered pyrrhuloxia, horses scalelike,

belted whales, and warm tubs

down bursting in arable

fluid of hot hash floor

fat & mummified moon stalking our walk

belt the wild spinning into a pod

 

 

About the Author

Amy Trussell's work has been published in many journals including THE NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, JUXTA, MESECHABE, THE PRAGUE REVUE, THE 33 REVIEW, OSHUN AFRICAN QUARTERLY, KICK IT OVER and many others. She is also a dancer and performs dance choreographed to poetry in the Bay Area and The South. She performed this year at the Zeigeist Theater in New Orleans. Her collaborative visual poetry with Jim Leftwich and collaborative dance video with J.Berry was exhibited at the International Poetry Biennial in 1999 in San Diego and Mexico City.