AMANDA HUCKINS
PARANOMINAL
calling it all memory is one way
to change its effects.
at age 30, lying in bed,
seeing my future memory, during my death.
being in my dying mind, looking at me,
seeing myself now. it isn’t prediction.
it is memory and i don’t recognize the
place where it happens yet, and i don’t
need to know if i’m old or just look old.
on a ruin of a commercial building
lagging with grass and no sense of
becoming valuable, right next to another building
and right behind a sidewalk and right under
my feet and legs and nose and my
vision peripheral to my literal vision
that helps me see that you will be in love with me.
were we talking with our mouths?
sleepy not mad, looking through a
bruise like a window. leave it there.
i learned to listen to you describe
what-hurts-where over months
and now we are seeing this image
of my grandmother raising someone’s
hurt children while someone was
hopefully entering recovery. that’s not
what was said though. all the sentences
about it made less sense than what we
could see when we spoke about
passing the skein of light or touching
someone by letting their pain
make a crater on you and closing your
arms around the whole them.
i didn’t say that either.
neither of us said this.
i said a net. the touches make a light net.
i don’t know what i said, other than
i told you my friend’s dream about the
dream person pointing to the wound in the sky,
saying we need to “fix the memory of souls to
heal the people”. i saw it oscillating through
your face and feelings. it surprised me
when you said that you finally understand
“spiritual technology”. all of the gifts
squeeze forward through the fibers of the net.
on that night, over the course
of more steps out into where we went,
we took turns feeling the pain of the other one’s
death, and sent us each a message about how
to find each other when we become separate
again, the worlds-between kind of separate,
and we took turns being the pained one
and (when not the pained one) holding the pained one,
imprinting the feeling of standing in the
snow in the morning in the future when i am old,
remembering us together on the couch right now.
we’re becoming continuous.
i can’t say what i mean. here it is.
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*** ** ***
SET IT DOWN SO IT CAN LIVE
i was born ready yesterday.
i learned what they taught.
kicks can come out of the sky
and knock you over.
glass baseballs come out of the sky when
god wants you to practice more.
apples are poison.
i ate it and didn’t die.
i unscrewed the lid from a broken jar
and didn’t grow weary.
i got a job and did not grow faint:
to take a bath
that will shift part of history.
they gave me a palette, i used it.
i don’t mind saying it’s how i
paid off my loans.
proverbs happened when
a 15 second summary was given.
gravy filled my grave
before me.
after looking in,
i can guarantee it’s not a maze.
it’s just a house.
when i hear the ticking beerheart in that body
there’s a chance i won’t flinch.
the drawer is thick. i think it is full.
i pull. now it is definitely open.
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*** ** ***
LOVE POEM
i love my mouth despite its problems.
i’m trying harder to pity myself less.
i wish these two flies i’m watching
were fucking so i wouldn’t be wishing.
i hate wishing.
i’m not exhausted yet, but since it’s bedtime,
i got into this situation with my pillows and covers.
in a purposeful act of refusal to know,
i reach my arm out, hoping it will stop on something.
it fully extends. i make a fist with my face.
sometimes: it takes a long time to finally get the “no”.
every time: i wait for it.
two squirrels are crawling around and around
the treetrunk. the lead one turns around, but
turns back around, returns to crawling away.
i’m worried they won’t stop.
for awhile i believed an idiot who said to me
“you are going to make someone a very unhappy husband.”
my mother suffered tremendous
erasure to raise me and another daughter,
starting with a son. she didn’t disappear.
i sent her a text it said
“to have a mother who loves you for being independent
is to have a mother who fosters rebellion in your heart
and revolution in your bones -judy chicago”
things were different and possible
because circuits were opened.
i’m changing some settings back so i can
return to the forest of no kisses.
inside the “no” i have been growing my arm.
now i can reach the love at the middle of my memory.
“i was here. i was in this lake.”
i touch my mouth to that lake i remember.
my mother told me about when her mother died.
“i think she got an explanation about what was going to happen,
like when you have a baby and they explain ‘this is what’s going to happen’
and you say, ‘ok. i can do that.’”
my mother said
“i don’t think there’s very many people in hell.”
a mostly red cardinal and a mostly brown cardinal
are sitting on a middle branch, mostly still.
they’re startled by me when i crouch to watch them.
the red one goes down and hides.
the brown one goes up and seems fine.
memory water goes into my mouth.
it’s salty.
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*** ** ***
ROUNDABOUTS ARE IN OUR CITY
teachers are talking shit on foodservice workers
and custodial staff. health technician is defending
not only rape culture, but literal middle-schooler rape.
my house smells good with the things i make up
under supervision from the internet. my friend posts
about being worried that someone doing extended leering
from a car is casing her body for trafficking. at first
i feel my conditioning say that this is emotional embellishment
then the artificially immobilized bodies containing
millions of women smash down on my thought
because they are the ground i was diving towards for a long time.
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*** ** ***
OLD TIMEY GENDER RELATIONS ARE STILL MURDERING MY SISTERS AT MULTIPLE SPEEDS
my main conflict in life is to answer the question
“do I want to be fucked with or not?”
men can argue with this poem but nothing they say about it matters.
you are probably smarter than your congressman,
and the combined executive leadership of the shitty company you work for,
and the loud man everyone is listening to over beer.
I think I have an ancient ear infection. it makes me hear under the utterances.
it is abundantly possible that you are smarter
than your boyfriend no matter how old or educated he is.
you are smarter than your dad in several ways.
fewer if he knows how to cry in front of you, but still some.
being smart doesn’t matter as much as they tell you it does
while defining themselves as it, but you are.
for the sake of illustration I’m gonna call it a computer that is inside you, making decisions.
i’m making biased assumptions through this whole thing and
GUESS WHAT. SO DOES THEIR EGOTISTICAL SCIENCE.
i’m being my own twin that murders their twin. that’s what living
inside this shit everyday accomplishes.
the computer inside you knows how to live and what should happen.
it knows what to say. i’m trying to be both Grimke sisters at once but i’m neither.
if you’re like me you’ve been rewriting everything the computer knows
and forgetting even to credit yourself with that ability.
it’s difficult to drown yourself without the help of rocks or
cement and you learn how based solely on context clues!
acknowledge that propensity, orchestrate it’s reversal,
use your excess propensity to dare them to fuck with you.
they already do. you might die of it. you might die from being nice to one of them, too, so.
you might consider writing out all the Angry Woman poems sitting inside your computer
in stream of consciousness, then edit them by deleting the very few untruths.
you might consider crying for a long time and asking your
great great great great great great grandmothers for help.
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*** ** ***
THE SILKWORM NO LONGER LIVES IN THE WILD
whats my job?
hear.
absorb the river of disruption
until i myself
become disruptured.
get to the room.
keep the noise in the room.
stay in the noise.
manage the noise.
put the noise
in your cord.
crank around your axis-
stripped of threading- hard
and wait for sparks.
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*** ** ***
CIRCUIT CLOSER
the storms nudging into my
dream continued through the front
of my face, side of my head.
through the storm i felt my friends
breathing asleep, breathing awake.
the storm a borderless gel
transferring pulses, overlapping to
make irregular thumps over my house
and their houses. we are living
in convoluted shelters. i clean the
top layer only sometimes.
the whole map is here on earth
with us. lightning released the fever
that had been inside my gland.
we each have a piece sunk deep
under our hologram, the thing
we see when our own symbols all
glint simultaneously. in the song,
i hear directions: get in the water,
it’s substrate, the water will charge,
will be charged by a source,
and we will charge and emit,
and the water will conduct every
buried piece. it will be trouble.
it will be our trouble together.
our fevers will break. our trouble
will break us through.
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AMANDA HUCKINS
Amanda Huckins is becoming overconfident in fighting for the inexplicable realities we all deserve. She’s technically inefficient. She’s an information conduit, mainly. The information often makes her cry pretty hard as it speeds through the chunk of the grid that is her.
(Author Photo by Rachael Wolfe)
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A Dozen Nothing 