Amy Bagwell and Robert Martin Evans :: Six poems

Plonger en apnée

               dive

without

an aqualung

among

the thin                        branches

                       closer

 to a delicate

             state                            more

  temporary                      than

snow
                fall                         

           ,

  the first time        I came

   out of you

 I felt

I’d left too

                                                                           
  much behind 


                                                a concrete

                             block 

                      

                                                   in the current

                                                              running

little sticks                               past

To Not Get Carried Away

Look closer

the seahorse’s tail
is not magical, not whimsical,
and never propels—

It is a desperate tether,

and seahorses strain
against nature, screaming
inside their heads,
all their lives.


All Night Breakfast Wine

She takes my hand
closes the fingers
kisses each knuckle

I watch her close
try to learn something

She holds up the fist
lets it drop hard
on the table

I help it bang

This is how we are
with each other



Your Wounds and I

Sometimes, I want you
in pieces. I want to swallow your voice.
I want to pocket your fractured eyes, take molds
of your broad hands and cast hundreds
in beeswax. I will warm them into
nothing when you’re gone.

How soft my hands become.

Always, like Carver’s rain,
I want to be not forgotten. While you sleep,
I’ll finger honey into your cuts without altering
even your breathing. When you finish
dreaming of my hands, your
wounds and I are gone.



My Hennessy Has a Half-life

Here’s how:
every glass I
pour I use
half of what
I had last

time—this golden
curved ceiling
your arms reach
folding into me



coda

june. my
fig tree’s covered
in fists for you, love, hard
for now, soon scarlet
on the inside.






All Night Breakfast Wine is a collaboration by Amy Bagwell and Robert Martin Evans. Half Amy’s work, half Bobby’s, it tells two dooomed love stories that, through the collaboration, became one. They didn’t set out to write it together, but as they exchanged work, the throughline leapt out, and the poems written since have sewn themselves into one another.

Amy Bagwell’s poems are/ will soon be in The Eyewear Review, Terminus Magazine, Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Dusie Tuesday poems, and Figdust, along with the anthologies Topograph and Boomtown. She makes text art and co-directs Wall Poems, Inc., a mural project, and Goodyear Arts, an arts residency program. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches Literature at Central Piedmont Community College.

Robert Martin Evans is a freelance translator and editor. His poetry has appeared in Vallum, Topograph, Oratorealis and Where is the river, and as one of the Wall Poems of Charlotte. In 2012, he was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He is a member of the selection committee at bywords.ca.