Ami Kaye on Poets Cafe

The following interview of Ami Kaye by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles (reproduced with permission).

Biographical Information—Ami Kaye

Ami Kaye is the author of What Hands Can Hold. Her poems, reviews and articles are forthcoming or have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Comstock Review, Amore: Love Poems, Naugatuck River Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Eyewear, Kentucky Review, Iodine, Tiferet, East on Central, First Literary Review- East, Cartier Street Review, Peony Moon , Diode, and The Dance of the Peacock among others. Ami edited Sunrise from Blue Thunder in response to the Japan 2011 disasters and is co-editing Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, as well as Collateral Damage, a benefit anthology for disadvantaged children. Ami is the editor of Pirene’s Fountain and the Aeolian Harp Series, and the publisher and founding editor of Glass Lyre Press.

Glass Lyre Press is an independent publisher with a catalog of technically accomplished and stylistically distinct literary work. Glass Lyre seeks diverse writers with a dynamic aesthetic and the ability to emotionally and intellectually engage a wide audience of readers. Glass Lyre’s vision is to connect the world through language and art, and expand the scope of poetry and short fiction for the general reader through exceptionally well-written books which evoke emotion, provide insight, and resonate with the human spirit.

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Shadow Nocturne

You were a skein of nerve, blood from my marrow,
sliver of bone, a silver weave of luminous cloth,

fire that spread through electric nerves.
Your little core palpated in its fine mesh,

its tremolo of strings could not hold you.
You shrugged off my body and slipped seamlessly,

knife-edge moon in the water, final glide from the womb,
before dissolving into a blossom on the snow.

Against the light I thought I saw your tiny fist,
too quickly pulled back before I could grab you.

Skin-tight storms ripped a trail of fireflies from the sky
but I remember only the ripe weight of grief, an ocean,

with you curled underwater as if you could breathe
at all from pinched blue nostrils.

Fallen sparrow, tiny creature I could hold in my palm,
I thought I could reach out and kiss your delicate eyelashes

but they were air-brushed with disappearing ink
on a fluttering moth that vanished into the remnant of night.

—First published in Kentucky Review, 2015