Amanda Leal
(West Trade Review Prize for Poetry 2022, Honorable Mention)
Image by Juan Pablo Rodriguez from Unsplash
Amanda Leal is a 29 year old poet from Lake Worth, FL. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Hole In The Head Review, Sky Island Journal,Levee Magazine, Pine Row Press, and others.
AMERICA
The night after the Texas school shooting, I lay in bed
with my son, the hot globe of his forehead in my underarm,
his metered breaths, his nose curved like an arrowhead,
the television light illuminating the tip like a runway.
Earlier, before I heard of the nineteen dead children,
we wandered a residential parking lot together, my van broken down
in the street, as I herded him into the field,
away from the empty parking spaces, his lanky giraffe legs
stamping down the knee high grass, scaling tree roots
in his sandals, tracing the burls of the trunks,
as he says, The trees have bellies, remembering how I taught him
to trace his 3’s earlier, the bellies that he carved with a marker,
gripping it like a staff in his fist. Suddenly, he backtracks down
the knots of the tree, yelling, I gotta pee, to the empty parking lot,
the strange townhouses, and I lead him behind a dumpster,
to the corner where a mattress leans against the fence. I show him
how to pee without stripping his shorts, pushing his penis
down like a slender bird, smiling as his urine glitters
on a Bud Light bottle. As the sunset splashes across the windshield
of my van, the sulfuric stench of the catalytic converter
beneath the hood, I wondered if the day could get much worse,
even with my son on my lap, his curls criss-crossed
like a woven basket. Later on, in bed, I listen to his melodic sighs,
the seams of his eyelids jerking with dreams, and I think
of the parents who did not know there would never be
another bedtime, the orange glow of our aquarium
filling the room like the last warmth left on Earth,
his hot breath against my side, his fists that tighten
in his sleep, gripping the empty air.
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