Amanda Auchter

New

A cuckold;
too young to carry around
such baggage, stealing
away in parked cars and
teasing birth with stealthy
touches behind rows of
gingerbread houses.

Her hair, I think,
shines to match mine
years later in dreams
of thick darkness
where he, now dead
and absent before I
needed him

sends her the gift of
me, a bastard child
of tarnished fate
like dinner silver.

She keeps me hidden through
careful steps and
missed dinners to
keep such a mistaken child small,
invisible inside the
whiteness of
her fleshy belly

that she rubs in
private,
under showered drops of rain,
bathing pregnant beauty,
alone in fury,
praying for a miracle.

Still, she sits and
feels the absence,
sent birthday cards
and cake eaten in honor
of my day,
hated mother,
looking at empty highchairs
where I should have been.

Thank you,
for the ability to live,
yet somehow,
when I was sticky and new
I saw through you

Mother, with navy eyes
as you walked out of
the room
as I lay, nasal tubed
and wrapped,
frying like eggs under
heat lamps

ready to be bought
by drive-through
parents,
stacked and sacked
in paper to keep
from spoiling.

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Amanda Auchter has published other poetry and short fiction with Speckled Words, Mind Flight, Shadow Voices, Benchmark, Zoetrope, The Wolf Head Quarterly, The Southern Ocean Review, Mind Fire Poetry Journal (featured poet), The Storyteller, Wilmington Blues, Poetry DownUnder, Alchemy, Gray Matter Tapestry, and several articles with The Parallax, The Daily Cougar and The Lantern. She also has a novel, Burning Sins to Ashes, recently released with Writer's Club Press.

She is currently a senior creative writing major at the University of Houston and works for Waldenbooks.

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