Amy Jomantas

THREE POEMS

WALLPAPER

The wallpaper hangs in shreds,
peeling birch bark.

With slick razor blades,
steamers, and paper tigers,
I scrape years off—
an inch a time.

I was a child here—
surrounded by the rippled water grain of oak,
while lavendar bloomed on the walls.

The walls beneath are scuffed, rough with leftover
paste and the drywall torn, revealing
its furry brown surface.

Below that we find gypsum minerals
with crystaline water molecules,
mixed with starch, paper pulp, and emulsifers
screwed to the bones of the house.

Before this structure welcomes new boarders,
weddings, babies, arguments, laughter and deaths,
I must repair the membrane—skim coat the wounds,
seal with primer the words that can never be taken back.

The last step calls for creating a final new skin,
a knitted laytex, the color of beaches where
we once played beneath ever-moving clouds.

 

RANA’S DAUGHTER

Her daughter’s hair is the fur of cattails
and her clothes fall, peeled husks,
revealing brown limbs.

Maysam jumps into the tub,
an eel slicing through liquid,
and emerges to laugh, but
only for a second, before
resting beneath bent, partially polar molecules—
the essence of water.

She is not her mother’s only child;
there are sons, lions in their own right.

One day Maysam will answer to men and

she’ll forget these moments of splash,
beating liquid to froth and air.

It is enough for Rana to see her
daughter—at night with her white cotton
gown bubbling around her—the atomic number of 80,
she is luminous quicksilver against a black sky.

 

GEOMETRY IN MOTION

Above the satin-encased arches,
my daughter’s muscled calves create parallel lines.

The left leg moves to perpendicular
and sweeps even higher to create a near180 degree change—
forming a new skewed line.

More breathtaking yet, is the
grande jeté, that splitting
of the legs as the dancer escapes gravity
and becomes a horizontal line
gliding above the rectangular stage.

Note in contrast to the the extension of the legs
—the arms form an ellipsis.

The soutenu recreates spheres spinning—
planets aligned to orbit
a single sun—crossing the sky in tight circles.

The right angle defines the pirouette,
rotating on an axis defined
by love and pain.

 

Amy Jomantas lives in Dayton, Ohio, writes grants, and works with immigrant and disadvantaged families and youth. Her poetry has been published in Catch and Release of the Columbia Journal of Literature and Arts, Wordgathering and elsewhere.