The man I fought with,whose ruptured limbs I left by the river,was gone in the morning.I saw his face on billboards & wanted posters,scanned for him as I passed through taped-off fields.I read about him in newspapers, bibles, the ancient encyclopedia.I found a map to Biltmore,kids were shooting bottlesbehind the guardhouse,staring as if they’dknown me in another life.Those days I slept in dangerous beds,waiting for the knife in the pillow,before the waters receded & my cousins reclaimed their land,before I invented the airplane& soared west to begin again.
Ode to Country Music 2
John Amen
after Big Thief
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“Ode to Country Music 2” from DARK SOUVENIRS: by John Amen.
Published by NYQ Books on May 1, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by John Amen.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine.
Beacon, New York
The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc.
"This is a book that will remind you why you love poetry, a book that will make you start writing poetry. In the midst of a brother's suicide, the brutality of heroin addiction, and friends lost to drugs, Amen writes tight, beautiful lines of regret: There are rooms I never leave/no matter how far I wander. These poems go deep, and then deeper, with an authentic voice that has seen so much, yet rises with hard-fought compassion: Who's/beyond reloading, firing a prayer into the long night? When you read Dark Souvenirs, you're reading the red fields, the red skies, the red heart of an inspiring poet."
—Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press)
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