“On Concealment” by Amy Wright
The Poet
Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal as well as the author of three chapbooks—Farm, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip, which won the 2012 Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest.
The Poem
On Concealment
Inayah says covering deters
fallacious love, her veil on the couch
Alice blue, her breast-length hair, pitch.
Her eyes dark as Saudi skis so far from city lights
she and her brother counted satellites.
*
Mason bee eggs are stationed well
by their parents, laid inside petal pods
to come of age like Arak in clay amphoras.
In ten months each shoots from its spent
mâché bejeweled with pollen grains.
*
I sip the tea she made, picture
dark swaths girding the satellites’ paths,
faint points dotting space’s fabric.
She extricates her ankle beneath her to fetch
favorite veils to drench, ripen my lap.
*
Of the same pollinating bee genus
gardeners drill nests to house, Osmia avosetta
have remained hidden in Iran and Turkey,
safeguarded in flower capsules, temples
evolved through generations of trials
exhumed and shot by National Geographic.
*
She does not resent Faris,
whom she followed to university
where she came to respect herself more
for choosing to cover, to protect and
proclaim her faith rather than for man
who sees enough.
*
They do not know their walls are oxblood
and cyan, only that it is silken dark
cached in nectar. Even when they exit,
wet wings kissed by desert candles,
they know only that they slept alone with gold
before word or color.
The Design
Poem letterpress printed by hand on 100lb archival card stock measuring 5.5″ x 8″ (flat) & packaged in an individual sleeve. Numbered edition of 50 copies.