Amanda Newell
Contest - 3rd Place
Amanda Newell is the author of the poetry chapbook, Fractured Light (Broadkill Press). Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Gargoyle, North American Review, RHINO Poetry, Scoundrel Time, storySouth, and elsewhere. She is Associate Social Media Editor at Plume and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Because I Am Lonely and You Will Not Know My Pain
I am pausing you at six seconds,
just after you turn
from the hood of the old
blue Mercury to look back
at the camera, at me,
though I am not there (not yet),
not the one recording
how the wind, as you adjust
the ignition coil, will whip
across your lips the loose
strands of your hair,
or how, beneath your fingers,
the Ironhorse will fire again,
so loudly that everything—
even the camera—will shake
with the force of three thousand horses.
“ In Bluets—a book that I absolutely love—Maggie Nelson writes that ‘we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.’ That sentiment very much informs this poem, which, I think, is about the astonishment of not being able to look away and the resonance of desire across time and space. ”
Listen: