The Shallow Ends
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A QUIVER OF

6/22/2017

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                    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.  ​




​
Picture
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. 
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