came in through an upstairs
feeder line and cracked a plastic
fastener on a toilet tank.
Found the floor and the hall
and filled them and fell down
stair after stair all weekend
while my neighbor was away,
crawled under drywall, needled
into baseboards, ran in streams
down studs (in darkness, past tails
of wire and sleeping pipes). Some
found its way outside, swelled
siding (warped into leaves
like an old phone book), stained
its signature, its I-was-here,
under windows, over walls.
Some went all the way down
to shifting springs the city
keeps trying and failing
to map. Some marshed up
lawns and fueled the creek’s
nighttime raging. More
still hides under the house,
waiting to move again.
Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal and was a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and her full-length collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Terrain, and ZYZZYVA, and she received a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works as a publications editor for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.