Amber Flora Thomas

Amber Flora Thomas Poems

Amber Flora Thomas Biography

Born and raised in San Francisco, poet Amber Flora Thomas earned a BA at Humboldt State University and an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her lyric poems often engage the body as a record of loss and accrual. She is the author of The Rabbits Could Sing (2012) and the Eye of Water (2005), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (2006). Thomas’s honors include the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize from Rosebud magazine, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and an individual artist grant from the Marin Arts Council. She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Dominican University of California, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Thomas lives in Fairbanks.)

The Best Poem Of Amber Flora Thomas

Dream In Montana

The ice splits over Blackfoot River. A moose comes
off the mountain to walk the avenues and neighborhood dogs
register their wildest complaints. Dry air. Dry want.
Snowbanks black from traffic glow, blue in the streetlight.
I walk along immutable passages where porch lights,
summoned by my footfall, turn on.
I don't think of the man.
In the blurred titanium of a dream, his body
swims toward her, easy breaststrokes.
Tonight, she grants him sleep as she roams the rooms
of their house. She grants him her certainty
that there is safety to be had.
From the street, I watch her write
in the yellow dim of a lamp, her stolen time,
with her feet tucked under a blanket. A portrait
with poppies like eyes gazes down at her from the wall.
I do not know what is innocent between friends.
Her reading Blake into the phone, a parchment
spelling out twenty uses for difficult. She exists
where the world suspends its fragment of feeling.
A paper falls from her lap and stays, leaning against the chair leg.
Had I agreed to meet here, where midnight
wants to be about mystery? Only sleeplessness
ushers me in. The moose and I pass invisible to one another.
I should have stones for this journey, lead weights
from fishing lines. Then would she know me, north leaving,
south arriving at their red house. If I were daring
I'd come to her window more dashing than a cardinal in winter
and flaunt my shining coat.

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