Amber Decker- Three Poems

No Approximate Burn Time

He pressed his heat into me

like I was a ball of wax on the lip

of a red envelope.

The melting was involuntary,

a reflex clicked into action

like a switchblade cutting

the long string of tension

that dangles between two bodies

in a seedy midnight alley.

The act of fucking

has always sounded to me

like something people who

hate each other do.

He licked my ear,

said “There is nothing I want more

than I want to fuck you right now,”

and the word in his mouth

rose from the ash of the obscene,

a delicious tongue of fire

curling up the wick of my spine.

Weeks later, alone in bed,

I can feel the darkness

he left under my skin

when he pulled away, cold

as the secular moon that drags and folds

the ocean into its own frozen depths.

He dressed without word,

eyes shielded from me

as though I carried the sun itself

between my breasts, in the place

where my heart pounded, volcanic,

hard enough to rush those hot,

vicious circles of blood to my cheeks

where they flamed for days,

like Rome each time it was left

wrecked, emptied of gold.

There Is No Standard Protocol

that has ever been issued for the act

of telling the people who love you

something they do not want to hear,

when rivers and oceans

have stopped being beautiful

and have become nothing

but places to drown,

when the smell of earth

after a heavy rain

is a graveyard at dusk,

a gallery of open mouths

waiting to be filled,

when the sound of rustling leaves

becomes the shuffling of feet

in a hospital waiting room,

the whisper of long-haired women

weeping in green hallways,

when love becomes despair,

heavy as a thousand lovers

with a single face

all balanced at once on your chest,

and your heart is a bluebird

too fat and tired to fly,

when you are brought to your knees

in sudden, desperate prayer

to a god you do not worship

by the sight of an abandoned

black sweatshirt hung

like a holy relic over the back of a chair,

its limp arms tangled together,

dangling before you

like a hangman's noose.

Trial By Fire

My biggest mistake was telling you

I'd never learned to swim.

Not really. Only to tread water,

my arms forever lacking the strength

necessary to carry me to shore.

At the water's edge, we cast stones

across the misty surface of the lake.

You take my hand, show me how

to flick my wrist in just the right way.

It's about control, you say.

You grin like Alice's Cheshire Cat,

teeth a-glimmer, as the sun sets

and darkness is ladled over us

like a thick, cold stew.

The last time we fought,

you called me a witch, threatened

to take me out in your boat

to the lake's black center, throw me in.

Shadows flicker beneath the water,

and I imagine the writhing hair

of accused women, their denials

of any wrongdoing proven only

by the eternal, stone-heavy silence

of the drowned.

You believe

I have been unfaithful, that my eyes

and the eyes of your friend linger

too long across the kitchen table

over glasses full of wine at dinner,

or in the rear view mirror of his car

while he drives and I recline in the back seat,

my thigh pressed to yours, my hand on your knee

and Jim Morrison begs “Light my fire”

across the decades in a voice

that sweeps me into the depths of longing

as swiftly as when you press me hard

against the stake of a gnarled tree trunk,

hands fumbling at buttons,

palming my breast, teeth grazing my nipple,

your sighs a song of possession,

my body a conquered fortress

burning under the red flap

of your war banner, and I wonder

what kind of woman

would ask for this?

Because I am ashamed

even now to confess

that you build a rage of bonfires

under my skin, that

the violence in you excites me

until I am screaming

like a bedeviled creature,

guilty as sin,

going up in flames.

Amber Decker is a thirty-something poet from West Virginia. Her work has been included in the groundbreaking literary e-zine, Exquisite Corpse, as well as other hip venues for alternative writing: Zygote In My Coffee, Arsenic Lobster, Phantom Kangaroo, Bone Orchard, Specter Magazine, Red Fez, and Black Heart Magazine, to name just a few. She is a lover of hooded sweatshirts, comic books, werewolf movies, good wine, tattoos, and Miles Davis. Her latest collection of poems, The Girl Who Left You, is available from California's notorious Six Ft. Swells Press.