Amanda (she) is a Toronto-based writer. She was shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Poem of the Year Contest, and her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in CV2, Grain, Plenitude, Prairie Fire, Room, Playwrights Canada Press, and elsewhere. Amanda’s chapbook Put the Ghosts Down Between Us (2021) is available from Anstruther Press, and her debut collection is forthcoming in 2024 with Palimpsest Press.
“‘Confessor’s Flood’ is a response to Neko Case’s 2006 album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, where each numbered section is an erasure of the lyrics from a song on the album in the order that it appears. This sequence covers the entire album.”
I
Everything is ancient.
Monument of fate
burns firm, tender.
Bravery is a mistake
of make-believe,
fragments of love
wanting and sick.
Down the street,
everything is so easy.
II
Love said
survive.
The skin’s glass
crooked
where I forgot
what it’s like.
Hey—move
tender.
There’s wolves
tonight.
Anything falls
behind running.
III
Tender strangers
are dangerous.
Half the time
I really try.
In the end, I was
between love
and the party
and love lied,
echoed:
hold on.
IV
Spectres like widows
toast vapor, disperse
weary and raised.
Truth, faster than
you and me, always
slips away.
Move like better
times are coming.
V
We laugh at regrets
common as winter,
each one after another:
weeds outliving their season.
I don’t care. Come, I’m holding
that feeling: all the love
we ever knew, secret
kept and hard.
VI
How can this life hang on me?
I kneel splendid and retreat.
Please, you know wonder.
When will I see you?
Will there be no one home?
VII
Go see about
the moon crying
revelation:
repeat it holy.
VIII
Suddenly madness can’t touch
time.
Drag it through winter
dirty.
IX
The quiet is in my pocket. The meddling night into the jaws. Delight divines: a haze. Never break for the sake of—
X
Maybe you should
never dive back
to the too late.
Your body may
be too late, moonlight
in a thunderstorm.
Above the clouds,
the la di da di da
di da of maybe.
XI
Here, I’m just a chain of relation.
Should my trembling own me?
XII
Here I am the touch
around the air.
It’s okay to over-
swoop, name you
the year I knew what’s
obvious. I come back
a fever, let down your
freighter. I’m still here.
