Chronic

It is time I discuss my sickness.

 

And here my fingers want to write
skinless. And sometimes it is like this—

 

a body unspooled in the red morning
light. The light that claims the basil

 

on the sill, my fingernails, my lungs
which strain with their own scarred music.

 

I begin to say, yes, I’m ill, as though
I were admitting an addiction, a secret

 

kept in a closet between shoes
and old handbags. I hold onto

 

the doorknob, try my feet
in the hallway. Look how

 

my shadows follow me. Look
how the light comes through my hair.


Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at HuffPost, CNN, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Rust + Moth, the Indianapolis Review, the West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Follow her on Twitter @ALAuchter.