Moon When All Things Ripen
& Ghazal For the Texas Flamingo
Amie Whittemore
Image by Valentin Fernandes
Moon When All things Ripen
Green corn lazes in my father’s field.
I have not seen it this year, nor last.
The moon, when it lays its pale shroud
over the corn, speaks in the language
of touch: do not fear what you will grow
into. As a child, I ran through the winter
wheat my neighbors planted, its rough
and cool blades bolstering
the part of me only the moon knows.
Under this moon, we hold each other,
a cascade of bug song leafing us.
You listen to me catalog my loves,
complicated as they are resilient, knowing
they exit and enter freely the gold cage
of my care. When I take you to the cornfields,
we’ll touch their green bodies, chapped
and sticky, sensuous and common,
horrible and sweet. I can’t stop loving
the corn. Or anyone. But have you ever
shucked corn, tried to remove every
silk? Love, it’s like that with me—
I’ve carried this silky shield a long way.
I don’t surrender easily what protects me.
Ghazal for the Texas Flamingo
“In June 2005, on a very windy day in Wichita, a guest reported seeing two flamingoes out of their enclosure. No. 492 and No. 347 had flown out of Sedgwick County Zoo.” No. 492 has survived in Texas ever since.
—New York Times, June 27, 2018
After more than a decade, Flamingo No. 492
deserves an actual name—my heart says Nancy.
When a flamingo looks into a mirror it blushes,
flush with pink parades, the flock a winking heart.
Friend, lover, mate: let’s declassify what we adore.
Species is no formula; a heart hails its charms.
Mutiny’s the colonizer’s word. Every flamingo
scouts lagoons, knows a heart from a locked gate.
A moat suggests trespass. A form begs mutation.
A flamingo’s heart is fireweed, cranky bell, plankton.
Without natural predators, she’s her own unruly skein.
Her song a flare. To taste her heart is to coil silk.
Beloved, I want you for your otherness, your curvy neck.
Beckon me in a language my heart can’t command.
Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.