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Headwind

Amber Flora Thomas

Weak motion of grasses and tern before the sea.

Worry’s school cresting here and everywhere

as failings.

I pace the cliff path, my hands cupped above my eyes.

The glare steals your progress, a kayak needling

the wide open.

Love means you answer, this the child’s rebuke.

A pattern crosses the point, hemming

the horizon: steamship.

I didn’t know you were the green pitch

unable to beat the storm to shore.

You didn’t know I was the lookout.

Get accustomed to the sad girl picking you

out of the sea, the knot caught in her throat,

and the unraveling of her speech: an endless rope

thrown out of me.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and Eye of Water: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, chosen by Harryette Mullen. Her third poetry collection, Red Channel in the Rupture, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2018. She lives in Washington, North Carolina.

About Amber Flora Thomas

Themes

About this Poem

“I grew up walking the headlands in my hometown of Mendocino, California, so the precipice is a place I know well. Then there’s my tendency toward worry, which I inherited from my mother and her mother, and so on. When I find myself in love, I inevitably end up crossing through this childish phase, when I worry my beloved will not return to me for any number of terrible reasons, chief among them that I am not lovable. And as a person who has lost friends and lovers over the years, I know that love reaches beyond the physical and is, in fact, endless. I guess I wanted to acknowledge that truth through this poem.”

—Amber Flora Thomas

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More by this poet

Shed

She is not afraid of gods. She leaves her skin,
still coiled, a great throat collapsed.
Gods have entered and left.

The door sounds like a throat clearing
in its rusty evolution toward shadow,
an atrium from scalding noon.

She treats the dark like a cathedral.
She is all swallow, the heart working
under every scale to outgrow a fortified spiral.

The cathedral swallows the heart.
Take up your broom. No gods are left.
She finished the mice in time for autumn's gloom.

Amber Flora Thomas

2018

Cupid

His wings rest at his feet.
His fists curl inside a brown paper bag.
The alert beak propped on his head

aims down the block into sidewalk pools
of streetlight. His red lips make plump
numbers. He has so much candy

the bottom bulges. A pumpkin arrives
on spindly orange legs, followed by
a skeleton crew of two with unkept

postures, baggy knees, and flaccid spines.
A ghost sidles up, his sheet belted,
a baseball cap holding sloppy eyeholes

Amber Flora Thomas

2018

Damaged Photos

You get into puddles with the sky
and when this fails
pit your girl against an ocean.

Choices blur and make off with rooms
in the whiteness. Winged enough to manage
your red kimono’s 37 cranes in various
trajectories while you make the coffee.

You as God with rattlesnakes
and His Admiral Death holding down the muscle,
headless and breath swollen.

You scattered in her facelessness
behind the screen door, not frowning, not joyous,
just working her hands in a dish towel,
folding them away.

Amber Flora Thomas

2015

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Headwind

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