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    The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat
    The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat
    The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat
    Ebook65 pages26 minutes

    The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

    By Amelia Martens

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    About this ebook

    Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.

    Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarabande Books
    Release dateMar 21, 2016
    ISBN9781941411247
    The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

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      Book preview

      The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat - Amelia Martens

      A FIELD

      Once upon a time there was a fly. Once upon a time there was an ache shaped like a sunflower, at least to the eye. Once upon a time a field lay down in a patch of gods and got shot through the gut with cotton and wheat. Once upon a time all grass was seagrass and we swam, serrated by the blades of all known light.

      WE WILL BE LONG GONE

      By the time Earth is pulled into the sun. No, this won’t happen while you are asleep. Not tonight. Those are crickets. Yes, they have wings. The sound comes from their legs, like violins. Not violence. Close your eyes please. The sun is on the other side of the world because other people need day. Because we need night. Because that is how your body is made. Yes, your body is magic. Close your eyes please. The sun that went into your eyes, into your skin, into the ground today, will come up tomorrow. Yes, I’m pretty sure there are others. The moon is not the sun. Yes, they might be married. Goodnight.

      POSTCARD FROM THE END

      The war was beautiful when it started. Men hung from streetlights, their bodies pressed to poles to catch a glimpse of paper rockets. For each device: a hundred thousand dollar bills were dipped in glue and wrapped around a blue balloon. Pop-pop. Then steady hands readied rockets filled to the brim with gunpowder. A short fuse fit just through the pinhole, and women drank beer when they’d finished their shiftwork building similar bombs across the street. Children danced on broken glass of classroom windows. They sang songs about flowers and

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