A QUIVER OF

                    by Brandon Amico 

Ask a bow       about duty:
            precision,
morality,         will—  
                        watch its tongue arrow.
 
 
 
Ask the lovers          about purchasing cycles:
            awareness,
interest,          decision,
                       consummation.
 
 
 
Ask the poet        how the projector moves:
           visual,
mental,          potential,
                      kinetic.
 
 
 
Ask sleep        to file
             a report—  
mission statement,       depths invoked,
                                     parents resurrected.
 
 
 
Query the cicada         on the branch
           wobbling—  
which?—        until falling,
                       only its frozen shell.
 
 
 
Ask not what your country      has become; trace
                        from constitution
the arcing shot of rights           through interpretation
                                                 and the simple gravity of its enforcement.
 
 
 
Ask not what your mother       has done for you—  
            bounced you down a flight of stairs,
forgotten you at the match       —look to what she hasn’t.
                                                 A thousand swallowed tacks.
 
 
 
Ask a book          what it stands for:
             the writer’s vision,
the collective conscious,          spine
                                                 all cracking open at a touch.
 
 
 
Ask the poem              to justify itself—  
                       flower,
spring,                         tilting toward the sun
                                    until the sun engulfs it.  ​




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photo by Cyndal McCarthy

​Brandon Amico lives in North Carolina. He is the winner of the Southern Humanities Review Hoepfner Literary Award for Poetry and his poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Awl, Booth, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, and Verse Daily, among others. You can follow him on Twitter, @amicob, or visit him at www.brandonamico.com.