Sample Poems by Amy Orazio

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Further In

When taste buds meet tongue
lapping is sewing
bumps to run your finger on
wanting for milk
gold as the honey thread
here our hereditary bones
are one:
firewood
to pile or pull from
the thread of this kiss
(we hang on to)
the sweet burnt texture
of those who come for the son

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Past the Brook

Those buried sources go
west of west
to gather commodities
lubricant for throat
crow's caw hangs
honey-er than thick
a flag half-mast
the evidence slipped

The widow has her own song
she is setting supper
but her bread is gone
can you pray for oil? I need oil to pray
to unearth these desert tricks

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What is Left

Olive salt
in your fingerprint
to lick the center
I have been waiting for
this raven gift

You say I am
cavernous
it is
but all of the stones
have not been
dismissed

Hull me
I have touched
every edge of the creek
what is left is
Elijah skin

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Faults Are Present

This present basin
whose floor is marked
with low ridges
and the plate
that moves wreath-like

How fingers meet
how bones in the hands
are loose they rattle
and the earth's sediment forms
magnets in green-violet ears
hover where north and east
are unzipped as a ribcage
pulled from nights like these
the plate is hot
and eroding borders

How words get inside
slippery
forming as faces
orange garnets to swallow
summer-lit bruising to God
to the I and the am

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Red-Bone Walk

And red-bone crouch
the desert foams
toward a song
searching for a well
with scrubland mothers
that shed and trill
To sing the city by night
is sticky as skin
but what skin is good
in rattlesnake country?

all hollowed
those words off the canyon

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Leaving

To find a love
as feral as

Or just a body
of water