LITTLE THINGS
Poems by Amanda Caroline Whitehurst
What You’ll Find
Wonder will be scratched up under your fingernails
and you won’t have time to pick it out.
At your apartment window, where at night
you can see into other windows and watch other lives
happening in other rooms (a tv light flickering,
a father putting his daughter to bed,
a fat mother washing dishes after a long new day),
you’ll feel so expansively restless
the whole mass of you will swell from the inside out
until you’ve filled your entire bedroom,
until you’ve outgrown your apartment and your street
and the entirety of New York, until your body is doubled over
and your spine scrapes up against the sky. Here there is everything.
You will find that it stirs and stills the parts of you
that go on forever.
Little Things
I’ve walked in on myself hurting.
Little things. Hauntingly pretty cities,
the sight of silver rings on a small hand.
Afternoon sunshine lilting in tree leaves,
on the roofs of homes. Words like oval.
The thought of quiet moments alone.
Of other people alone, too, feeling
sharp tacks pin little things
on our corkboard hearts
because we don’t know
how else to keep them.
You & I Are Poets
in that we never fully capture.
You & I flit around ideas,
admire distant landscapes. Let lake water
lap at toes, biting playfully.
You & I are hummingbirds flirting with hyssop,
flying south for the winter alone:
to have you would be to take what I have loved
with tensed muscles, loved from far away
would be to lick a star-salted sky clean.
About the Author
Amanda Whitehurst is a therapist and writer living in New York City. She creates poetry and short nonfiction that has been published in various literary magazines, and she is currently working on her first book. When not writing, she enjoys running, reading, traveling, and trying something new.
