Self as Search History
Unraveling mask, roving loom
bedraggled threadbare sparse
stargut feathers, sprawling pines
evergreen evergrowing
molt
Books as memory, extended self
Praying mantis, metamorphosis
incomplete
trust — corroded eroded and dead
trash bag petulance, crickets
heat heath heed, don’t call me
sweetheart
How to stop being a desolate landscape
Are people made of seawater
sprinkled with lilies and stingbees
veering nasturtium spaceships
maybe a wraith or two
gladiola vagaries, dust bunny bone
Internet as extended mind, self beyond body
Local windstorm rips gutters from eaves
sends sandbox tarp sailing over cul-de-sacs
and graveyards
How to see comets from your basement
Violent cicada god destroys humanity
with an unearthly tone
split tips pittance, the composts of August
and rotting plums
Is the multiverse a honeycomb
I haven’t cried in twenty years
but with you I remember
the sea
Sobriety in the End Times
A crow struts with leaning strides. My strawberry blood
riots against me, choking on facefuls of earth. This drink —
lassitude mixed with heady turbulence, placidity lacking.
Cattails, insect drills, and trilling sparrows. A plump duck,
unhappy and love-haunted, bumbles into a hunter. Rose heads
toss upon the water’s edge, misshapen and nursing upon
egg-timer grains, their stalks behind them. Sunbeams
beat my nape. A bee lurches forth, snaking and snaked by slabs
of wind, slapping. I’m a thread — stung, coiled, and floating
upon the murk. Abandoned tractor tires sink further
into the mud, forming pools. Galaxies spin, thoughtless.
Pomegranate autopsy — the skin peels back to reveal
a cerebrum of red seeds — op of hell, loop of hell, loop of he —
Discordant, the moon — gibbous and gold and sputtering over
charcoal — pitches headlong through the dusk to cradle herself
in the arms of an unkempt elm. Distant mother, do I dream?
Wildflowers surge in sea of wind.
The shining field takes flight.
Amee Nassrene Broumand is an Iranian American writer from the Pacific Northwest. A Best of the Net nominee and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in numerous journals including 3:AM Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Rust + Moth, Barren Magazine, Sundog Lit and Empty Mirror. More: Twitter @AmeeBroumand