Amy Gerstler Poems

… People hit
the sauce in a big way all winter.
Amidst blizzards they wrestle
unsuccessfully with the dark comedy
...

Rocket-shaped popsicles that dyed your lips blue
were popular when I was a kid. That era got labeled
"the space age" in honor of some longed-for,
...

Why are the woods so alluring? A forest appears
to a young girl one morning as she combs
the dreams out of   her hair. The trees rustle
...

A million years ago the earth grew cold. Iowa was covered by twenty-five hundred feet of ice. No one knows why the glaciers formed and spread, or why they eventually retreated.
...

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
...

(Bubbling and spuming
as if trying to talk under
water, I address you thus:)
Must I pretend not to love
...

Through what precinct of life's forest are you hiking at this moment?
Are you kicking up leaf litter or stabbed by brambles?
Of what stuff are you made? Gossamer or chain mail?
Are you, as reputed, marvelously empty? Or invisibly ever- present,
...

Tamed by starched collars or looped by the noose,
all hail the stem that holds up the frail cranial buttercup.
The neck throbs with dread of the guillotine's kiss, while
the silly, bracelet-craving wrists chafe in their handcuffs.
...

The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly
drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while
science was the music of our minds. Our sexual
...