Mid-Winter, Far West Kentucky
I am a series of ghosts;
the bones in my ankle creak
my ascent and descent
each stair, a platform
to perform new human
transcendence, or rest.
From the backseat
our daughters discuss
how many children
can fit in the heart
of a blue whale, how
all blood is blue until
it comes out of you.
The light is yellow
as I transport us
through the inter-
section, over ice.
My mind fixed
on microfossils,
the bits of teeth
and skeletal splinter
of manta rays found
shattered in the desert.
It turns out two
children can fit
into the heart.
They ask me to play
the song about trains.
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four poetry chapbooks. In 2021 she was awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in 2019 she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.