AMPLE REMAINS

  • ABOUT
  • CURRENT ISSUE
  • PREVIOUS ISSUES
    • WINTER 2025
    • FALL 2021
    • SUMMER 2021
    • MARCH 2021
    • FEBRUARY 2021
    • JANUARY 2021
  • SUBMIT
  • ABOUT
  • CURRENT ISSUE
  • PREVIOUS ISSUES
    • WINTER 2025
    • FALL 2021
    • SUMMER 2021
    • MARCH 2021
    • FEBRUARY 2021
    • JANUARY 2021
  • SUBMIT

Heron Bait

Amanda Auchter
I think about buying a woodcut print
made by your wife. On it, a heron

dives toward a human heart. Its one eye
looks back from where it has come--

pebble gray sky or marsh—not toward
the heart that waits to be devoured,

which is what hearts want. Which is to say,
it is what I once wanted--

to be pierced, dove into, greedy and violent.
Heart ripped and terrifying. This heart

has no color, no prize of blood or flesh.
Come here. I unbuttoned my red blouse.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, Crab Creek Review, The Indianapolis Review, The West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project. Follow her on Twitter: @ALAuchter
← previous
BACK TO ISSUE ONE
next →
header image: Kosta Smith via unsplash