Weekly Poem: ‘I’ll Say It Again’

By Amanda Nadelberg

Shame gets out of bed for
no one in particular and there’s
nothing wrong with that. We say things
until we don’t want to anymore.
That is called broken, it’s
called desire. If the room
were another half itself more, if
the trees were quieter when they
grouped together talking and if a city
was in my house and you were in that
city. Well anything just about ends
when we fall down at night. Having
moved toward victory, I was ready to
lie on the floor until it was all over.
Waiting the forest out, we spoke
I think you kissed my arm. Darkness
finds a meticulous hole and falls asleep
inside. My mouth has little corners.
See, return is just another word for
shame–no, virtue, molecule? Blight.
The ghosted things we used to do as
beggars for the waves still make good
stories but stories come with graph paper,
graph paper with song. I could show you
something but I don’t want to, I have to
keep my coat on, I have to
take us home. The pin light at
the end of my mind flashes off like
it just had to. Color as your new
best friend, I asked you what you’re
still doing here, you said you wanted fire.

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of “Bright Brave Phenomena” (Coffee House Press, 2012) and “Isa the Truck Named Isadore” (Slope Editions, 2006). Originally from Boston, she is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She lives in Oakland, Calif.