The men all want someone younger, she says. She paints a likeness of her cup, leaving the bent cream heart for the paper to represent, an absence
she’s seen too often pulsing on a screen, then stilled. Paging back through the notebook, the hues—blue porch of a shored-up house, auburn hay coiled in a field—
she dismisses them as sketches. Turning to a new sheet, she says, What I miss is touch. There’s a sound in her brush, water from the bursting tip
filling the marsh of the paper, distant crackle of dry land drinking. A mountain stands up to the sky. Thin hairs spark wings of birds.
Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal and was a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and her full-length collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Narrative, Terrain, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works as a publications editor for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
