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  • Shed
  • Amber Flora Thomas (bio)

She is not afraid of gods. She leaves her skin, still coiled, a great throat collapsed. Gods have entered and left.

The door sounds like a throat clearing in its rusty evolution toward shadow, an atrium from scalding noon.

She treats the dark like a cathedral. She is all swallow, the heart working under every scale to outgrow a fortified spiral.

The cathedral swallows the heart. Take up your broom. No gods are left. She finished the mice in time for autumn’s gloom.

There are some cathedrals like this shed behind the house where she shunned her body and in the dark was not afraid of gods.

Sunlight tears past our legs on the plywood flooring to find the coiled skin that overwintered the fleeing heart.

Dig your broom into corners. She is not afraid of gods or matriarchs. [End Page 241]

Amber Flora Thomas

Amber Flora Thomas is the recipient of several major poetry awards, including the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Prize, and Ann Stanford Prize. Her published work includes Eye of Water: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the Cave Canem Prize, and The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012). Most recently, her poetry has appeared in Zyzzyva, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at East Carolina University.

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