Alone Ghazal

It's you on the bench with the snow at your feet at one
In the morning, singing my name to no one.

In the Garden of Awakening Orchids, I watched
Two people marry on the count of three, two, one.

Street kids share safety pins and toothpicks.
They hold each other like prizes, as if they'd won.

When asked if I'll marry, I refuse to answer.
My mother reprimands, I don't like your tone.

A male seahorse births his future.
Starfish prefer to live alone.

The answer to my question:
It's the marrow in the bone.












Two Is One Now

Two is one now, in the stinking bed.
One arm is two now in the bleeding bed.
I reversed the curse now in the sinking bed.
Sunk into the pillow and emptied my head.

Tame is the bookshelf that tips out the window
Spilling the slant of the bird and the bow.
Here father, here farther we fetch the good news.
Here father, here, farther we bury the Jews.

What says our parents of all this new dread?
What says our parents of this ache in our heads?
Here my daddy is dying a lot.
He sleeps in a bathtub and pees in a pot.

Took time to read once, but that wasn't fair.
I had to sleep deeper and cut off my hair.
I imagined the absence of fingers and toes.
Slice one and slice two now and on with the show.












Our Father Is A Heart-ist

My father took my sister's weak heart
and turned it into a rubber band ball to dash off
into outer space. It bounced against Saturn's ring

and ricocheted back to Skokie with elementary
joy, like tagging one's name to fortune cookie
paper, stuffing it in a helium balloon, and letting

one's fortune fly to the shores of undiscovered
lands. When that happened, my sister started
to believe in love like no one's business.

She gushed. And the world felt her asthmatic
Presence in the most desolate corners, from salt
Lakes dried out in northern Kenya, to mosquito

Infested waters in the Amazon, my sister's
Heart beat and bounced endless into human expanse,
Its drastic elasticity stretching everyone's sense of possibility.

She breathed again, and the world breathed with her,
In sync, an Olympic sort of harmony on the planet.
Our hearts held high courts to praise her living.

And then when my father realized how she chose
Life again, and lived, he reached into my mother's
Chest and turned her pink pace-made heart

into small wooden hangers on which to hang
his vintage suits with blue banjoes embroidered
into infinity's worn sleeves.

He reached into my chest and molded my heart
Into xylophone bones fit for erratic music making
In the great THAR desert of Rajasthan. My father

Became a king of hearts, the metamorphosis
Complete when my elder sister's heart became
A country, and we all moved there, nationalists

With irrational love for our new home, inconsolable
Faith in hearts flung wide open in the family way.
We who could not breathe together, breathing again.












Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein writes poetry and creative nonfiction. Her poems appear in KONUNDRUM LITERARY ENGINE, CONTRARY, LA PETITE ZINE, IN POSSE REVIEW, PAINTED BRIDE QUARTERLY, ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE, among others. Essays on teaching poetry appear in TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL and TEACHERS AND WRITERS MAGAZINE. She currently lives in Chicago, IL.






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