from What savior

AMANADA AUCHTER

“Bonfire at Ocean Beach”

for T.D. 

Gerald flicks his cigarette burn scar into the bonfire. It’s a star but doesn’t leap over our heads. Instead, it sputters, bacon in a pan. Todd brings the brick he chucked through his drunk mother’s windshield to keep her from driving away. The bonfire grows and we watch our old omens, our albatrosses burn. Someone adds more driftwood, a prayer. Someone shows up, tosses in a cat collar. Another, a frying pan. Jeff drives up in the U-haul his father filled with chairs, bookshelves, stacks of sweaters. He tosses in the key, the tires, the whole damn thing. Samantha digs her jacket pocket, pulls out her grandfather’s striking hand, pitches it into the flames. The fingers curl toward the smoldering palm, a reverse hello. I bring the door my father kicked in. In goes the doorknob, the chipped paint, my smudge of blood. The fire ignites the sky and we carve our names into the wet sand. Orange sparks in the black night. It’s high tide. We watch the sea erase each letter of our names. 

“Online You Are Still Alive”

with a line from Paul Otremba

I hit play to hear your voice. You read

your poem about sentences and fire

and a place I’ve never heard of. I play it

again and again and then we’re laughing

over beers and cigarettes on Matt’s deck                                             

and you’re telling me about a poem

you just wrote, your favorite line—

You are dead. You are dead—and I say

I can’t hear you, it’s loud, tell me again.

“Imaginary Son: Cremation”

And here you are, my little
almost, my box of night-
song. I pace the room
and its wall of white roses, 
flick the elephant mobile, 
watch its slow spin. You’re 
no longer the smile in mine, 
the thumb in the mouth, 
the mouth at my breast. 
I set you on the side table. 
Pick you up. You weigh 
nothing — breath of ash.
A door’s soft close. 

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, HuffPost, CNN, Crab Creek Review Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and lives in Houston, TX. 

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