Ami Lovelace's Blog

Saturday Morning Breakfast

I am starved

depravity bounds on the edges

of estrogen deprived skin

hunger rides in the ridges

of the wrinkles around this mouth

around your mouth

and your salt

lick the wounds

do you?

should I?

that broke open

when you crashed into us

(against us?)

wait now

while we eat in this mess

of blankets and bodies

tangled up in the empty
(calories)

breaking the fast

our fast

of sex? no. maybe.

of more than that.
of unremarkable sleep?

that excludes

you from me

for what? for why?

dissolved in the dreams

we no longer have

(when did you stop appearing in them anyway?)

replaced with chronic snores

and broken nights

stuff a pillow around my ears

your ears

our mouths

suffocate what was once the breath of

us

already droning in a muffled

wheeze

then shhhh, and silence.

the ceiling stares back

burns the past into our retinas

and we

and I

and I

and I am left wanting.

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Button(s)

push
tug
      RUB
slide fingertips around
Rip
my clothes off, tear the threads
of my button(s)
swollen off, extending out
until
    Until
         UNTIL! breaking
free of the tightened fingers
pu-pulsing, pu-pulsing, pu-pulsing
spurting off in cascades
of pearly white
Away, away from the body
my undulating sea
watch it crest

My button breaks
taking no more
off the cuff
the evidence leaves a trail
Opalescent strings
delicacy! from the fingers
loosed around the hole
and I sigh back
exposed
and tremble with flesh
to air
and breath
Blown

-Ami Lovelace. 

©2013. All Rights Reserved.

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Write from a place of hope
a place under the layers of taut skin
and dirty nails
and seeking mouths
and salted beads created in moments
to remember
dig
through the smog
of words and fears
breathed out by an inconsistent
environment of surviving voices
be thankful
for this place of hope
the light dim through the darkness
but shines still
and beckons
and beacons
cutting like diamonds
against mud-drenched glass
streaked but not shattered
mirrors, mirrored
until it bubbles through
bright and warm and is
upon your own skin
again
and Blinding
enough so you cannot see
past the fluorescence
so you cannot fall into
dancing shadows
and easy corners
pure, simple, tunnel-visioned
hope


Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

What it means to be lucky

when it counts
it's not the blowing on the dice

or scratching away the silvery grey flakes
that gather in the dirty cuticles
of a hopeful hand gripping a lotto ticket
it's not a raffle ticket carefully scrawled with legible letters,
drawn from the billowing bleary red of others just like it

it's not matching the black digits air-popped up on innocuous white balls
read aloud by some tall blonde in a sequin gown with a glittery voice
it's not finding a penny, Lincoln side up
or hitting that Grand Slam in the bottom of the ninth

or casting the right response in glowy blue
to a question posed over an 8-Ball

 
when it counts
its the seconds after tragedy
small minutes that creep like weeks
trudging through the not knowing, the hoping,

the gut-twisting fear,
it counts
in the moments after your ears ring with names and places:
Columbine, Virginia Tech, a mall in Canada, another in Oregon, a packed theatre in Aurora,
a defended military installation Ft Hood, a peaceful Sikh temple,

an elementary school in Newtown,
in your own hometown
it counts
in the moments held back by flimsy yellow barricades
stark black lettering: Police Line Do Not Cross
Crime Scene Do Not Cross
rattling hope even as it flutters in an arctic wind

you're too numb to feel rake against your cheeks
it counts in the moment they run
sprinting down and out and away from the black unknown
eyes locked and legs carrying them
out of the darkness, across the yellow,

to you

and it counts
when you hold your loved one,
wrap your arms around your baby boy, your little girl
around your lover, your sibling, your parents
and feel their heart beating against yours
it's in the moment, you see their face

cracked open by a strained smile or blurry
obscured through an outpouring of tears
yours. theirs.
it is in the quivering of shoulders
and heaving of your chests
as sobs come like breath and
words are lost and buried

in the crooks of your necks

when it counts
it is in the meaning of grateful, and sorrow
and knowing that they can still be felt
that you are alive, that they are alive
to still feel
and sometimes, it is even in the guilt

for thinking more could be done,
for wanting to do it,
for being lucky in still drawing breath
when others lay still

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Brother



I held you

barely wrapping my little arms

around the baby fat pudge of you

bundled in soft yellow flannel

with gentle blue embroidered bears

you were so heavy then

but I lifted you anyway

watched you smile and gurgle

caught your spit up on my little

pink tutu dress

I imagined our lives

full of barbie play dates and afternoon bike rides

stepping on dandelions

and running from Yellow Jackets

barefoot in a green summertime yard

tossing that big blue rubber ball

with its one yellow star

bigger to us than the sun

ever could be.



I hold you now

not in my wrinkling hands,

but with a swelling heart

that although bursting from my chest

seems too small to contain my love for you

too insignificant to express how proud I am of you

that little boy, with wobbly legs

chipmunk dimples, and a mischievous curiosity

that burned fingers and broke bones

that little boy who trailed behind and tagged along

who I know sometimes felt so small in the shade

of a big sister's shadow

but was so acutely seen in her eyes

towers now, above a life you have built

with your own grownup hands

blazing trails and drag racing down highways

faster than this big sister can keep up



so I watch

through blurry eyes and a quivering smile

with raised hands and dancing fingers

screaming on the sidelines as you round the bend

winning each lap in your own Grand Prix

Go kiddo! Go!

 

~Ami
Lovelace

©2012

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

What's in my journal

Something more than words
blot across a page
tears, laughter, hope, fear
frozen in a black or blue or leaden moment
usually, now, not lead, not graphite
smeared and wrought into
a web of something more than a story
than a fact, than me
but it is me, pouring,
flowing like the ink from the pen
as it caresses,
streaks naked truth
across the egg shell paper
bound in hidden staples or cream threaded ties
I confess, I confess, I confess
my sins commingle with my dreams
and possibility is fact, is written
in will
and the melodic songs chorded
in the scales of sorrow
noted, punctuated with a Rest,
and quiet in the hush of ceremonial
burial under a pillow, or the bottom
of a crepe papier box,
faded purple
stuffed in a thicket of other shoebox memories
cobwebbed and forgotten
in the attic
in my head.

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Blocked.

What I really want to say is
nothing
that I have nothing to say
nothing important or groundbreaking
or earthshaking or restorative or reclamative
or healing or offering
in the way that these women do

in the way that everyone else around me seems to
nothing was so devastating so traumatic
so deprecating
that I have not risen above it
and yet
still sink down into it
a brown quicksand that I claw and

wrangle
and always manage to climb out from
because it will not drag me down
I will not let it drag me down
but this good, this great
these intangible aspirations
that everyone's already clamored at

scooped up and carried in their own
palms
and out through their own voices
and bled through the ink on their own fingertips
they feel so beyond me
murk and mist thick to dampen my breath
and suffocate my lungs when I try

try to take it in
and quick, so incredibly, undeniably fast and loose
that when I reach out
fingers scraping to wrest it, to form it, to mold
and manipulate and use this density
for something other than stagnancy and hope

my fingers catch evaporation
and my nails are left with dirt and grit
and teardrops and
air
where words and genius should have
been held
should have been formed
and the steam trail
pecks and blisters

at the nerves risen up to my skin
tingling the sharp needles of nothing
good, nothing
great
drilling, boring hollows into my bone
into my meat
into that inner me
under the ribs and slick in the marrow

that settles into a gangrenous hope
a rotting genius
and diseased could-haves
spreading in burning should-haves
until the mind is riddled with the
black pockets of devouring nevers
and lethal can'ts.

2012. Ami Lovelace.  All Rights Reserved.


Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Metamorphosis.

I am full of hope today,
the kind of hope that reminds me of what it was like
to be a kid
to have the galaxy fall from the sky and touch your fingertips
to know you could dream
and that those dreams would come true.
that hope sits with me
in my stomach heavy and moving
churning it rises up on the wings of butterflies
caught and flurrying in my digestive track
they want to break out of my mouth
in words, or maybe something much more disgusting
so I keep it closed, along with my eyes
and I remember that childhood knowing
and I beg and I plead with it
to return, to make sure that hope, caged
in my ribs with all those damn butterflies
that just don't quiet fluttering wings,
spins its own chrysalis
and emerges joining the swarm as
a reality.

2012. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.


Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

Artist.

i need the moments today
the last few left I have
to tick away the quiet anxiety
that has nestled just under the surface
of my skin
i need to hold a paint brush
and splash frustration
and fear and desperation


onto a canvas, away from me
into the soft glow of a blurry
streetlight lit in the mixed midnight blue
of an acrylic park in the evening
acrylics are always easiest for beginners
but I need something heavy, something experienced


in expression and the difficult shades
of emotion
maybe oils, slick and messy
and hard to wipe away clean
it takes work, scrubbing
attention to purge them
or maybe ink
black, red, blue, purple
bleeding from a pen


into the arms of a journal
where the words
can breathe, and dry
and settle
into a life outside my body
as castaways
creating their own story
hunkering down against
their own hurricanes
but ink smudges


into the lines of my fingers
into the definition of my identity


2012. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.


Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.

North of Beautiful

I want to drive along the coast
thrust over the hills and mountains
of my own landscape
pull up to her seas
watch the waves crash and break
and come again
cross the frontier and leave


fear behind on the borderland
gas and go through the forests
and the farm fields rippling
wheat blonde in the wind
I want to drive north
through the detours
and pass all the exit
signs
no emergency stops here


lead the highway, not follow
along its jagged edges
meeting the midnight stars to
her oceans at the shimmering Boreal cliffs
and dive in
just north of beautiful.

Content Copyright 2011. Ami Lovelace. All Rights Reserved.