It’s not love if he can’t make you cry.
Forgive me, I am foolish, I am still learning.
Forgive me, there is still a child inside of me.
I am no longer afraid of the dark.
I am afraid of the light.
Swapping poetry does not mean we are in love.
Wake up, wake up. The sun is rising.
Fire, thunder, water, ice.
On a map, an inch is a mile.
Your teeth are stuck inside of your skull.
I like your hands when they are hurting me.
I like your eyes when they are not looking at me.
Don’t you ever get tired of giving giving giving?
Sometimes I play a game, where I lay perfectly still, eyes open, holding my breath, pretending I am dead. But my heart keeps beating and I eventually gasp.
My mom used to tell this story about how you have to poke a hole in the sky to let the light fall in.
My dad opens beer bottles on the patio, wondering.
Maybe it’s better to be struggling than dead.
I don’t know, maybe it’s not.
Maybe I am a worm waiting for talons.
Maybe I am hiding in the ground.

I am The Fool,
hanging upside down from a tree,
hanging on your every word,
hanging in the balance.
The hangman,
a bag over my face,
blackness,
silence,
a sudden drop
as if god flicked his wrist
and said ‘I do not believe.’

Oh, delicate intricacies,
as if an insect’s wing
has become me.
Wooden beams
and light falling like clouds
and music in soft songs.
I am so unbearably fucking full.
Of poems, emotions, colors.
First, I am a tree.
Branches,
twigs,
woodchips,
splinters,
sawdust,
nothing.

by Amanda La Valley

People are the same everywhere.
Dying, sad, grotesque, lonely.
I turn around,
a full circle.
The moon in the sky.
A nipple,
a bellybutton,
a freckle.
I memorize star maps,
this is Callisto,
the bear,
she turns around the poles.
This is Cassiopeia,
spending half her time upside down,
who believed in beauty.
These are my palms.
They are not constellations,
but they have seen stars.
Magnificence.
A life moves towards the end
and they tell me a birth is the beginning
but I don’t know.

by Amanda La Valley

If this is the way the world works,
dissolve me
until you find what needs to be here,
because it’s not me.
I am blood and milk.
I am a bowl of each.
I am burning
burning burning.
I am the river separating two cities.
I am a star in the heart of darkness.
I am a cat who licks its paws.
Strings stretched across an expanse,
tuning and writhing like
pitch.
Scratches down your back in the morning.
A path is just a line in the dirt,
a red mark down your spine,
a string pulled across the universe.
a bridge going one way.

A man walks into a cafe
and writes a piece of music so beautiful
he forgets everything he knows.
Like the son who he hasn’t spoken to in 6 years,
and the bruise around the waitress’ eye,
and how uncomfortable he feels inside of his body.
And there is no cafe,
and there is no man.
Only the music.
A magic song,
when played he can remember things;
the first time he tasted an orange
and the smell of his mother’s perfume
while she held him as a baby,
and he knows things, too,
things he shouldn’t be able to,
like how his son dreams about wolves almost every night,
and the waitress is still in love despite her husband’s fists,
and that his body is like a shell that the crab wears
and there is only
the music, the music, the music.

by Amanda La Valley

She hasn’t.

I’m writing a book of love poetry,
a complete volume set about
how you look in the middle of the night
when I wake up to roll over.
Also, I am a werewolf.
I grow claws and fangs and
a need arises in me so poignant I could cry,
like you do when you listen to Tchaikovsky
or speak to your mother on the telephone.
I must resist the urge to bite you in bed,
but you are so soft and wanting,
I am sure there is not a word
for the kind of giving that you are.
Some would call it selfless,
but maybe we’re just lonely.
Maybe we give each other
a space to fill with our emptiness.
I am not so good at eating,
I am too full of your need.
You ask me over cups of weak tea
what its like to be a slave to the moon
but I think of myself
more as a warrior in her service,
I am sworn to love her.