Amanda Peery is a poet and writer living in New York City. Email: amandapeery [at] gmail.com
Socrates’ Complaint About the New Technology of Writing This discord of words left in our heads by dead men—their twisted syllables—this braid is coming loose again. Those yet-unborn will be the guardians of our thoughts. They will be the hearers of many. They will have learned nothing. *** Now what we had by heart no…
For the Artists I know you just want to be a flute the wind sings through to make a melody or an intricate mistake like the existence of crystals in nature, drifting as flakes to cover a field in a clean white blanket or inside a rock, the tiny, glittering caves. In other words, you…
What To Say To Rain I would like to beat down into the world too & make everything growing glisten. … What to Say to Sky After a Storm It’s too late when the silver sun blinks awake we already learned how to live in our soft bodies in the wind & dream through the…
by Amanda Beth Peery MOTEL IN AN OASIS TOWN Jungle-blooms unfold shiveringly out of sun-baked stretches and creases in the streets where round-hipped women wear second-hand silk dresses over bodies that have been worn and worn again. In the motel, we leave handprints griming the glass behind factory-weave curtains. We leave handprints just to leave…
I’m trying to get down the light: smooth-pooling & blue midday a touch of peach and green rising off the street at night & casting against my face. I try to get the light into my body so it won’t leave me I swallow everything glowing: it started with leaves hanging coated with a dazzling…
by Amanda Beth Peery Mr Cogito is trying to make his soul more porous like the screen door of a house in the country letting all the air in. Mr Cogito wants a soul like a net catching colors & conversations, catching visions: the singing through the door of a cathedral on a crooked street,…
by Amanda Beth Peery Ms Green isn’t any good with love poems or tokens, doesn’t like small, easily lost objects. So she wants to give him her visions—for example the wedge of park & slim streetlights shattering in shallow rainwater like swarms of bottled fireflies or clusters of leaping stars. She wants to give him her gratitude for life itself: darkness broken…
by Amanda Beth Peery There’s a door behind her ear—or really in the fold where the ear meets the skull where a down of short brown hairs nestles up to her ear-cup, the door sometimes burns and she drags one long fingernail deep along the crease like an animal scratching itself with a claw to…
by Amanda Beth Peery I wanted to transform The way people sometimes change Into birds or trees— Their skin begins to ripple Like a current is Bodying through them— It puckers into stems That feather out, or drip Down into rust-colored leaves.
by Amanda Beth Peery In the service area where a handful of the families of New Jersey have pulled off the highway, the trees are surprising me with their thickness— the edge of a secret or rather forgotten forest running beside the turnpike. A small animal occasionally waits, then breaks from the velvet shadowed elms.…
by Amanda Beth Peery Ms Green didn’t believe her mind was a dark room full of poisons— a room cluttered with rags pills, torn tinsel, perfume in lavender glass. She got stuck sometimes inside her mind like a bit of lint caught in a web meant for a fly. She got stuck sometimes sitting still,…
by Amanda Beth Peery Arriving late at almost midnight after an interminable drive but somehow still too early to your childhood home you see everything clearly, as you left it, a few glasses in the sink, and a slim vase holding deep-pigmented zinnias encased in water hazy as a still lagoon on the homemade kitchen…
by Amanda Beth Peery In a tight skirt her breath is bounded by zippered cloth– sometimes ugly, Ms Green’s thoughts flit like light on a wall through rain and through the apple tree swaying beyond tied curtains. Sometimes ugly, her thoughts pick shallowly at ideas all day give endless minor critiques in tiny handwriting. What…
by Amanda Beth Peery She tips her golden watch up her wrist to wash the soap's extra speckled sponged white drops, left like a sea substance foaming across rocks or some mysterious ice, from her own unshelled, soft winter-pink wrist. When did her hands become aquatic, not impervious to water and the callous scrub but…
by Amanda Beth Peery Many articles have been written about the greatest Hamlet actors of all time and what they brought to the role. One such article, a 2014 New York Times piece, describes John Gielgud's 1930s Hamlet as "melodious and intellectual" while Laurence Olivier played "an expressly physical Hamlet of quicksilver mood changes and…
by Amanda Beth Peery In this image produced by Google's DeepDream algorithm, a pattern of archways stretches across the screen in an Escher-esque eye-game, the intricate façade of a building with impossible architecture. This vision is the result of a computer program, a neural net that has been trained to recognize objects and, when looking…
by Amanda Beth Peery In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, he describes a fourth-century BC painter, Apelles of Kos, as superior to all other painters. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Apelles "continues to be regarded as the greatest painter of antiquity even though none of his work survives." How is it possible that the artist…