We stayed up playing gin and practicing
our swing moves spinning record after record
in a big band punk progression fueled
with a bottle of giddyup champagne followed
by another not so good.
Over my ankles young and thoughtless my skirt
jittered while moths taxied up the screens
and you looked at me like a rose had opened
in a drainpipe but you had the good sense
not to say love while the world outside
bled from its fissures.
We had The Clash and A String of Pearls
and my old rug wasn’t made for dancing
but it muffled our heels enough so that maybe
no one noticed our small and almost used-up joy
moving our shadows over the map with its
fragile borders held to the wall
with thumbtacks.
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.