Hayloft by Amie Whittemore

Associate poetry editor Sarah Bates on today's bonus poem: It’s been months since I first read “Hayloft,” and since then I’ve been walking around with a “nubbin of cat purr” and this hope-filled concept of forking the unforked past. I’ve found myself believing in a place where anything can come from boxes and dust. The poem’s address awakens a certain kind of intimacy that sticks and dares you to imagine your own spine, your own life and losses, and what you will do with them all. 

Hayloft

Nowhere is there
light sloshing up
and down your arms
like it did that time
you climbed the ladder
to the hayloft.
Nubbin of cat purr,
scurry of small unseen;
what will you do here,
small one, limber
and brittle as these
aging floorboards?
No one is watching—
not even the slatted
dust-freckled sunlight.
Slim column of empty
boxes for a spine,
I’d like to roll you
over the edge,
fork the unforked past.
How you tremble,
thinking this forbidden
climb is bravery.
I don’t want to hear
anything pretty boom
in your chest. I won’t
supply dragonfly wings,
shoe squeak, centipede feet.
Darling self,
no one cares
how we sculpt ourselves
from rags and dashing.

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Amie Whittemore earned her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Smartish Pace, Gettysburg Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg 2013 Poetry Prize, the 2012 Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival poetry prize, and a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in July 2011. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.