Think of us as tired. We traded
the ocean for disposable cutlery,
Ziploc security, a new toothbrush
every three months. We thought
we could not matter and not of
matter. We thought of time as stock
projections, if not linear, than peaked
lines—a mountain range of our lives.
We could not agree on temperature
and left all the windows open
and left the heat on full blast, because
no one could afford beachfront property
anyway, because God works
in mysterious ways, because we
were distracted by our shiny
self-significance in a sea of glitter.
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat, a book of prose poems selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. Her chapbooks include: Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She met her husband in the IU MFA program; together they have created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters. https://ameliamartens.com