Amy Miller

February 23, 2024

“Umbrella” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

UMBRELLA

Someone said Watch
the baby, so I watched her
sleep, small mouth with 
a bubble at the edge. Hands
 
like little double OKs. All
of human history pulsing
in the shallow vein
of her temple. A thin beige
 
umbrella over her head, 
raindrops exploding 
themselves against it, 
trying to touch her.
 

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Amy Miller: “I am not a baby person. Grew up the youngest kid in my extended family, never liked babysitting, never had kids of my own. When somebody passes me a baby I freeze, holding this squirmy little creature. And yet … I was a school photographer’s assistant in my 20s, and found that I loved working with kids, especially the little ones who needed help blowing their noses and combing their eyebrows (that’s a thing in photography). It was actually one of the most thought-provoking jobs I ever had, although I constantly had the flu. Now when somebody hands me a baby, it’s still awkward but also sort of epic. Time and galaxies collide.” (web)

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May 21, 2023

“On Seeing My Home Move Backward Through Geological Time” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

ON SEEING MY HOME MOVE BACKWARD THROUGH GEOLOGICAL TIME

Of course I picture the actual house, my little peaked roof
riding the plate southward back through Neocene, Cretaceous,
 
beachfront, then sub-marine, and passing through the dinosaurs
so fast—they were only our granddads, but there before
 
the flowers began. So long—but what is long, when before them
everything felt the world die off, a 76 percent extinction,
 
and that’s not even the big one before that, when almost
all of the plants died. What I thought would be wonder
 
instead has me thinking about lab tests
and art and sitting with friends and laughing and the speck-
 
ness of us all, and the fathoms of space. And us,
just wisps, white forms on an x-ray, nature riffing out another sub-
 
species, us with wild impractical hair and voices
that sing at the kitchen window while we’re doing the dishes.
 
And although my neighbors have a new sound system
and The Lord of the Rings on endless replay, I feel
 
forgiving toward them tonight, with their magic
and sleepy brotherhood. I mean, it’s all extinction
 
eventually, and look at us, we made movies about
dinosaurs, and a boy walking by the water found the tooth
 
of a mammoth just last month—that recent in the blink
of life in the vast dry eye of the planet. It’s possible
 
to think more than one thing at once—that’s
evolution for you—and fear of leaving this life
 
rides right along with a oneness with the megalodons
and the algae. And the die-offs—I can hardly say
 
the word—we have all fallen, cancered, arterially
seized so many many times, entire oceans
 
of loss and leaving. Tonight four pillows
on the couch lie together like a pile of sleeping
 
cats. The prayer plant closes its long hands.
The Christmas lights will have to come down
 
from the doorway, dark bulbs from another
season, while the house moves swiftly through the year.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 21, 2023

__________

Amy Miller: “An interactive map that shows you where your town was in relation to landmasses and oceans millions of years ago has been making the rounds of social media this week. What begins as a fun diversion—‘My house was beachfront property in the Late Cretaceous!’—becomes an existential rabbit hole when you start reading the descriptions (lower left corner) of what was happening on the planet at that time. At many times, what was happening were mass extinctions. Pondering the massive die-offs and how many millions of years it took for life to rebound each time, and how often that has happened—it’s a staggering, sobering perspective. I probably learned this all in school, but I was young and it didn’t stick. It’s sticking now.” (web)

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April 11, 2023

“Rhode Island” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

RHODE ISLAND

for my mother

That summer in Misquamicut, when boys
as ripe as roadside corn shot pool in darkened
eighteen-over bars, I found the joy
they buried deep in denim straight-front pockets—

pipe screens, joints, and all the damp and salty
wounded want my navigating hands
could plunder. Home and sunburned, bedroom walls
my gulag—no diary, no dolls—digging sand

and ashes from the trenches of my shoes,
I heard her laughing—late, in bed with Dad,
no malice in her voice, in love—a girl whose
moody boy came home for her with mad

martinis, seven jokes to sleep on, sleep
itself a garland he laid at her feet.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

__________

Amy Miller: “When I was twelve, I wrote a story for an English class, and got an A. I wasn’t a good student, so my parents were thrilled, and made me read it in front of some dinner guests one night. My parents hadn’t read the story, and didn’t know the dialogue contained the word ‘bastard.’ When I blurted that word out, the adults were horrified, aghast—I might as well have thrown a cherry bomb in the toilet. That was my first inkling that creating something out of language could actually have an effect.” (web)

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September 6, 2022

“A Lullaby” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

A LULLABY

Sleep now. The city
you were building in your head,
its shouting and conveyances,
its strikers and unhelpful signs,
its cops with their stern citations,
rest. Rest the piteous call
from your sister and the words
you boiled in the pot
all day.
Somewhere
deer fatten in a sudden
thaw. A lake floats hundreds
of Russians in bathing suits.
And your dreams—no one can take
those wild paintings
and unbelievable music,
or your lashes dropping
their feathers, or the factory
of your own lungs,
quietly working into the night.

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014

__________

Amy Miller: “I love a lot of things: a dense tower of Blue Lake pole beans in August, that shoulder season when we hear both frogs and crickets, pretty much every dog I’ve ever met, racquetball and playing fiddle. But that Big Bang moment that happens when I’m writing a poem, when suddenly something exists that wasn’t there before … that’s a different kind of thrill and addiction. And like that lover you can’t get out of your system, its maddening unpredictability only makes it more desirable.” (web)

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April 26, 2022

“The New Superstitions” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

THE NEW SUPERSTITIONS

When the movie starts, cross yourself
for all the nights and weekends
lost by the long lists of workers, for the ones
who got sick and quit the business, who blew
all their money on shrinks, for the one
who got beaned by an ashtray thrown
by the petulant star.

Walking by a playground, throw bark
over your left shoulder as you watch
the little boy tease the girl, the budding man
inside him rising like a fist.

Wear your lucky slob clothing while you watch
the movie of the man playing a slob, his sideways
sneer like your own while you crash daily
into the obstacles of love and faith, while you try
to balance a coffee in one hand and your childish
expectations in the other, while holding
in the fold of your belly a fear of being made a fool,
of loving a photo of someone or maybe an actual body
living right there with you, who has always set off
your alarms but you choose to think they’re only
your own irrational blood pounding
in your ears for no real reason.

On the sidewalk, step over every doubt. You have
no room for them. You are busy and you want
to like what you like and go to bed without
a nagging thought that burrows in and wakes up
your body at 2 a.m., whirring in the dark.

Do not walk under the ladder of your friendly
neighbor, who has always been too friendly and
damn it, you don’t want to think that, you want to be
stoned on kindness like a yoga teacher, but you also
have caught him looking down from his upstairs window
late at night while you’re bringing in the trash can and
damn it, that’s never felt right.

If you break your car’s side mirror you’ll get seven years
of some guy watching you eat lunch as you sit in the safety
of your ’67 Cougar before you realize his face hasn’t moved
from his mirror and he’s watching you steadily, sitting
in his car in the next row in the lot, bouncing you off
a 45-degree angle and making some motion you see
just enough of to know, and you start your car
and drive away nonchalantly as if you didn’t notice,
watching in your mirror to make sure he doesn’t follow.

While you watch the movie, light incense to bring you
back to yourself, to remind you that you are living here
now, that the world has always had dickheads, that you
are not sitting with one right now, and outside a frog
has started up croaking behind the hawthorn bush,
and he’s talking about sex and maybe some aggression
but you know exactly where he’s coming from,
and you’re not a frog so it’s just a song, something
that lulls you to sleep, as all lullabies are darker
and more dangerous than you once believed, but even
sleep is now something different, not entirely pure
but it has its pleasures, its emptying, its motionless beauty.

—from Poets Respond
April 26, 2022

__________

Amy Miller: “I saw the news this week that Bill Murray has been fired from his current movie project due to ‘inappropriate behavior.’ The article goes on to describe decades of aggressive and violent behavior toward fellow actors, artists, and his ex-wife. Reading this brought back—as so many things do—the hypervigilance that women live with daily; you can’t live as a woman in the U.S. and not know about that. It’s exhausting to see one pop icon after another bite the dust; there seems no point in admiring anyone. Our culture of celebrity heroes is flawed at its center, engineered to break our hearts. More vigilance.” (web)

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December 22, 2020

“Nipa-Pon” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

NIPA-PON

I found myself nearly calling him
the other night when my car
had lost its senses, seven hours
in the shop and still not true
to its simple self.

I could see us sitting in Nipa-Pon
with cups of tea to our noses,
the young restaurant owner
cautious and inquiring
with an eyebrow, why so long?

Sometimes it’s the suppers
I miss, a man of too much soup
and a familiar fork with noodles,
the way you held the money gently
before giving it all away.

—from Rattle #15, Summer 2001

__________

Amy Miller: “For me, poetry is a way of saving snapshots in a life of uncertainty. It helps me remember the things I saw along the side of the road, even when they were going by awfully fast.” (web)

Amy Miller is the guest on Rattlecast #72! Click here to watch …

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May 18, 2020

“Higher Love” by Amy MillerPosted by

Amy Miller

HIGHER LOVE

At the emergency animal clinic, I’m standing
in the bathroom thinking the crying room—
big and softly lit, a plant in a corner, the walls
airbrushed in grays and browns. The only place
in the building you can be alone. I remember
meeting a woman one night in this clinic waiting
for her Collie, injury treated, disaster over,
big bill paid. She told me she’d lost count
of how many times she’d been there over the years.
This is the first one I’ve brought home alive.

It’s the 4th of July weekend and hell’s broken loose
out there, the stories I heard in the lobby—bitten
by another dog, hit by a car, ate a box of candy,
foaming at the mouth from some new med.
My own cat 16 years old and stricken down
so suddenly that all he could do was lie
like a fallen tree and watch me though the vents
in the carrier all during the half-hour drive.

The stay is two days, the bill two pages long,
and now I’m standing here in the bathroom thinking
of people crying, though they say I can bring him
home tomorrow, just one more night of fluids
under the futuristic hoses and wires and dark-faced
monitors, his orange body blanketed in a warm balloon
of air while the vet tech types numbers on a pad,
a distant dog shrieking, a sound I can still hear,
that carries through God knows how many walls.
I wash my hands and push through the door

into the lobby and hold it open because a woman
is running toward me, her face swollen as a bee sting,
wet, her shoulders convulsing, a sound drowning
in her mouth. She rushes past, and I don’t dare
look, but I can see everyone—the lobby full, couples
and singles and families, some waiting with a dog
or a cat, some sitting alone with their phones and Cokes
from the machine, maybe fifteen people, every one
looking at her, and—reader, you have to see this—
every one with a face full of love and complete
recognition. No judgment, irony, glad-it’s-not-me,
a whole room of understanding while she pulls
the door shut and latches it to cry for the baby

that I now see—I remember this man from earlier,
how she sat with him in the waiting room when I did—
and in his arms he carries a small body, terrier-size,
wrapped tight in a blue blanket head to foot,
motionless as he bears it through the front door
into the parking lot. I follow him out,
but I can’t see any more—how gently he lays it
on the back seat, I’m guessing—because I’m
getting in my own car, eyes down, letting him
have his peace alone. To intrude, to help—
it just isn’t done, or I don’t know how, and neither

did anyone back there, though we all know exactly
how high that love goes, most of us with no kids
or ones that are grown, most of us lying in bed at night
with a dog or cat snoring softly in the half-light,
the not quite deep-death night but the still-living kind
that makes us want to stay awake an hour longer,
the air outside alive with tires on the road and those crickets
that only started up a week ago and now sound like
they’ll keep singing that aria forever, even when
we all know sooner or later it will have to end.

—from Rattle #67, Spring 2020
Students of Kim Addonizio

__________

Amy Miller: “I was in Kim Addonizio’s private workshop for about a year. This was in 2001, and I took several of her multi-week courses. Kim was a fair-minded but tough critiquer; she had a way of cutting right to what she called the heart of the poem, the thing that gave it life, and pointing out lines that dulled that heart’s impetus or drifted too far away from it. Her toughness, more than anything, had a lasting effect on my writing. I learned to revise brutally, to sift through workshop comments just as dispassionately, and to stick up for a poem when its unique voice or vision was getting lost in the rewrite. Her workshop was a sort of crucible, a hot forge that made me stronger as a writer, a better judge of my work and others’, and I think it’s very hard to keep going as a writer without that kind of toughness. I know I just said ‘tough’ about five times. I loved that about Kim.” (web)

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