Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak
At night, I leave all the lights on in my head.
This way, I know the dead can find me.
Sometimes they toss me their worldly trinkets:
the moon, wobbly as a child’s loose tooth,
a tuning fork, a spear of lightning for my song.
Like a magpie, I collect them.
I line my own death-nest
with the baubles of the dead.
Nothing, not even death, can harm me.
Copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Knapp. “Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak” originally appeared in New Orleans Review. Used with permission of the author.
Elizabeth Knapp
Elizabeth Knapp is the author of Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (Washington Writers' Publishing House, 2019) and The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Literal Latté Poetry Award, the Discovered Voices Award from Iron Horse Literary Review, and a Maryland State Arts Council Fellowship, she is currently an associate professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where she lives.