Aubade
Amos Jasper Wright Even the dust settled bygone on our aftermath like an event destroyed and then dissertated. Morningtide rose around us like water over an island and the bed, a raft in the metaphysics, sinking. Oh, she thought I dreamt, warmed by Abishag’s perishment. I eavesdropped upon her and her lyric somniloquence, the auroras she dreamed, and then silence came, that good thief in this summer house, placed a hand over her mouth. I heard everything that was invisible: the peach tree that transplanted itself in a country without morning, the garden whose gate I thought led to paradise, the butterfly that circled to us from Argentina. One indivisible love, a song of one note for two voices, a single monolithic season, carved from the cornerstone of the increate earth, dripped through morning over a summer of nights. In the morning firelight, after all subtraction, the streets will be bloodied, for we lived in that kind of city. Where even the night was rented, like a room in a tower. She returned to the obscure silks of Paris’ lingerie like her résumé and exited barefoot into the gloaming. I see now, unable to greet the same sun as everyone else, I left my hand inside you. My only weapon against the Song of Solomon. Keep my hand - you will need it to shake the hand of silence. With nowhere to be, she did not holiday even to disagree with the light’s argument, that we can change what we see. Brainwash. I am not convinced. |
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About the Author: Amos Jasper Wright is native to the dirt of Birmingham, Alabama. He holds a master’s in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a master’s in urban planning from Tufts University. After living and working in Boston, he returned to the Dirty South and now works as an environmental and transportation planner in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to support his writing habit.
His fiction and poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Clarion, Off the Coast, Folio, New Ohio Review, Tacenda Magazine, Interim Magazine, Salamander, Pale Horse Review, Arcadia, Union Station Magazine, Zouch, and Yes, Poetry. He is currently at work on several novels. He is also co-editor of the White Whale Review, an electronic literary journal. His author website can be found here.
His fiction and poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Clarion, Off the Coast, Folio, New Ohio Review, Tacenda Magazine, Interim Magazine, Salamander, Pale Horse Review, Arcadia, Union Station Magazine, Zouch, and Yes, Poetry. He is currently at work on several novels. He is also co-editor of the White Whale Review, an electronic literary journal. His author website can be found here.