April 2006
Two Poems by Britta Ameel ’06 MFA
Listen to "After the Gallatin River, Outside Bozeman, Montana"
mp3  (requires audio plugin)
After the Gallatin River, Outside Bozeman, Montana
The moment after begins. Birds on your sill
offer themselves. A flock of thumbs. Flight. No
question
of ascending. Speed. After. What did I do?
An act I remember but can’t place. Something small.
Turning a faucet. Afraid to move the papers that stack like layers of earth.
Not –glow, not –light, something silver and sticky.
After water. Smoke. After gauzy curtains blowing in the middle of a hot day.
The space between nail and flesh.
We are fast as highway nerves. Wooded trail,
dapple and grid of birds. Twilight cuts
the light half from the dark half. We are edges, we are
now,
the moment before now, after now. We move away.
The sugar still sweetens in a blue bowl on the counter.
Imagine the whole valley filling with
silvery smoke, not air, more ash and fog.
The camping sparks underneath indistinguishable as nightfall.
Diamonds at the gray field’s edge.
This sea comes too fast and in shades of dust. Are you here,
this abyss of a dream and have I dreamt this highway back to you.
The hot light through the pine tops.
Begin on the bank
east of bear country and a big sky. Sun sets
itself down like a teacup in your lap. At home, your spoon
next to the typewriter next to a window and a curtain
sheer enough to see one way, almost the other. Your arsenal
of pain, the sitting down and the standing, bone after bone
after bone.
Later, underneath, I dreamt a crow, his tail on fire.
The breathing and the breath. This imagined drowning in air not water.
Take me with you. I floated
the river that cuts through that valley, bumped
at the water’s lowest since last year. I jumped off a bridge.
The cold and deep water. So far away you must dredge for shadows.
About solitude. The aspens, quieter snow,
maybe it was a Sunday, air a prayer, nether-bound. What about boats.
Words foam on our lips. Loose them to whatever’s outside.
Do you believe in it. That solace. Are there questions left to ask.
The rush of it,
siphoning off, the thrushes at your sill, the dust in the room, glass shards.
The train shakes the water of the water glass.
We are water and it’s a wonder we do what we do.
A Bowl Full of Pearls
Listen to "A Bowl Full of Pearls" mp3 (requires audio plugin)
looks like the white boat
that dresses the horizon;
I have stayed too long on my back
and sand sticks to my tongue.
There once was a dressmaker
who invented bolts of white
fabric so porous it takes its wearer’s shape
upon touch, temperature.
Even the moon is battered
like a silver bowl when its ellipse
collapses imperfectly.
Have I not somewhere scrutinized
a dead white-feathered moth laying eggs?
Did the eggs first bother me, or the death?
Like the pearl earrings
I lost when I escaped the chalk
town, water dripping from all the
ceilings?
I am the woman sealed in
by heat, a second skin of white fabric,
cut out of another person,
white even on the soles of my feet.
Teeth against lips like bodies in snow.
Dark coats and pocked landscapes.
The dressmaker stitches
the shutters. I am trying to equate
my mistakes with their consequences
and everything adds up to pearls.
They pour out of my mouth in strings
when I try to explain.
The moth made cutouts of the moon—
bowl of white water,
pearl bubbles popping at the surface
like white boats. Everything
is brighter from far away
and set against snow. Close up,
dull as beach glass wintered by sand.
BRITTA AMEEL has lived most of her life west of the continental divide. She grew up all over and went to high school in Salt Lake City and college at the University Of Oregon. Westerners don’t constitute a distinctive literary school, she says, but "there does seem to be slightly more concern with the natural world in some Western writers’ work. I have lately found myself identifying with some Western writers' concerns, namely their interest in geography and the effects of place and displacement on the body."
Before entering Michigan’s Creative Writing Program, from which she will receive her MFA this spring, Ameel won several writing awards at the University of Oregon. At Michigan, she has won a 2006 Hopwood Award for poetry (the Michael R. Gutterman Award) and the Hopwood Program’s Cowden and Meader Family prizes. She also won an honorable mention award for poetry in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly Student Writers' Contest.
While studying and teaching in Ann Arbor, Ameel has published her poetry in several journals, including em, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Fugue. She cites faculty members Anne Carson, Raymond McDaniel, Linda Gregerson, Lorna Goodison, Thylias Moss and Khaled Mattawa as helpful and encouraging mentors.
The poems heard in this issue of the NewsE will be published in the next two issues of the University of Montana at Missoula’s CutBank Literary Magazine (http://www.umt.edu/cutbank/).
After graduation, Ameel plans to visit relatives in Sweden and then move to San Francisco.
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