Your Amaryllis Is Definitely A Surveillance Device
I mean look at it, all stalky
with flowers just at the very top,
like those cell phone towers
designed to look like no known tree.
Phonograph-shaped flowers
array in all directions to pick up your words
and answer the question: to what
are you loyal? To whom?
They show up in everyone’s mail at Christmas
as though some nameless autocrat
made a new year’s resolution
to get to know us all a little better.
And what has yours learned
about us? Two women whispering
in the dark, or sometimes crying out.
Does it know the way we trust
that neither of us would open
the other’s journal? No agreement
was made, no promise extracted.
I want to know everything about you,
my love, but I want you to give it to me,
a small fruit falling into my hand each day.
I would never take it the other way,
by forcing the bloom.
I Love How You Look When You’re Flossing Your Teeth
Your eyes half-closed, as though looking down
at this task you cannot see. Navigating by feel.
Your hands deft; your mind, I know, must be
flitting to other things. Unaware of your face
in the mirror: softened, as your hair has softened
from tight curls into waves, as though every part of you
is relaxing into sleep. Your eyelashes casting shadows
on your cheek in the glare of the vanity light.
Amanda Hope lives in eastern Massachusetts with her partner and cats. A graduate of Colgate University and Simmons College, she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nixes Mate Review, Lily Poetry Review, The Shallow Ends, and more. Her chapbook, The Museum of Resentments, was published by Paper Nautilus in 2020. You can find more information about her work at her website, http://www.amandahope.net.
