Antarctica, 1979
Death is not dark as you’d imagine,
but white, frozen, your name
signed into the otherworld of stone
and ice. It’s easy to die —
one day you’re 22,
offloading a Coast Guard cutter,
and the next, you’re tumbling
toward the snowsheet, pinned
beneath it, your heart
slowing to a freeze. You listen
to how your blood stops
singing in your ears, and you know
somewhere else you’re already
beginning to exist — another you —
you feel torn in half, one black boot
lodged under the wheels, the other
waiting to be born. In the last moments,
you don’t remember faces, but wish
for one more inhale, another burn
whiskey, a mouth to kiss, to smell
the sweet silks of your baby’s hair.
Amanda Auchter
Amanda Auchter the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, Crab Creek Review, The Indianapolis Review, Rust + Moth, UCity Review, The West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project. Follow her on Twitter: @ALAuchter.
