Amarys Dejai in Conversation with American Poet Jeremy Michael Clark
“I think there’s value in wanting consistency … But I also think it’s important to allow yourself to just be in the world, to experience it, and see what you encounter.”
A Morning’s Apology
“The wood thrush begins / a gentle song, threading its music through / the quiet.”
I heard your feelings
“Chewing up the valley like cold / teeth. At the snout end, evidence / of mass strandings, / beached sediment.”
The Sting of Empty Bitterness and its Pleasure
“So here do I lie, / spent and flaccid as a lake in the sunset, / a blush of birds kissing nocturne from its surface.”
That Night, We Walked along the Dan River
“the wooden waterwheels, the peach blossoms, / that mirror themselves by the water. / These small things of the ages / all know us.”
Instructions for Having a Mother
“Look, this is / my sweet home. Tell the teacher / it’s abandoned, impossible, scary / to enter because of a bad monster / living inside, hungry for me.”
thisbe on the walls
“Once, a man in Afghanistan commanded his wife to be veiled from sound entirely. Once, a person can enter a house / only to find there is no door behind them, just a vast endless corpse of wood blocking their way.”
Good Grief Ghazal
“My mother makes a midnight mass of girlhood grief. / I am her devoted disciple by God and umbilical. / Like Isaac, not listening will do me no good, grief.”
i’ve always wanted to fistfight god a little
“i withstood hell — lovers, / mostly — for the promise of heaven and was doled / out a second dose of hellfire. then a third, a fourth.”
Accidental Geometries
“I think of all these people leaving / themselves in brief windows. / How some ascensions are linear.”
Navigating the Night
“I wonder if the black bear / I glimpsed earlier, roaming fields / of wildflowers, prowls now, seeking / a midnight feast.”
Dear Pine Forest II by Gustav Klimt,
“I never wanted children so naturally / I had them. All my daughter cells hate me. / All the places I’ve kissed bad men / have closed down.”