rose from pavement,oil-black, its eyesweak coffee, its teethcrowded and yellow.The bear stoodon its hind legs,dripping tar.The bear came to me.I did not ask.I did not want.Glamsy bear,bear of dark unrest,cloud-spun;bear coiledin its own gravity,in its soot-stained coat.Bear of loss.Bear of reckoning.I turned to face it,offering a hungerthat required no mouth.
The Bear
Amie Whittemore
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“The Bear” from NEST OF MATCHES: by Amie Whittemore.
Published by Autumn House Press on March 22, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Amie Whittemore.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Emily April Allen
Emily April Allen
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third collection explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life.
"This collection of poems feels like an aching love letter to desire in the queer body. There is at once a wisdom and a deep vulnerability in each poem, which does not seem accidental; this mixture is an intentional, calculated balance. The collection inspires the reader to appreciate the holiness in both stillness and the natural elements that move all too quickly."
—Sinister Wisdom
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