What witness you are little wing-
beat again my son’s throat. Your eyelash
flutter, how his breath
fills your heatless flit
from earlobes, wood beams, coarse fur
(the donkey, slight bray
in the hay of the stall’s deep shadows). I’d like
to think of you as his first visitor,
counting fingers, toes,
each wisp on his dark head. The night
sets itself between us and you, you filigree
through cobwebs,
braids of onions, straw — ghost,
night angel, figment of my maternal
exhaustion, here
to light, to whisper. You,
drift of hay, dust mote,
trick of light, then gone.
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, American Poetry Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter: @ALAuchter.