poetry by amanda auchter
Actinic Keratosis as Bad Love Story
It starts small — a brown freckle
there one morning in the mirror
as you rub cream onto your face,
brush your hair. Little fleck
of not much. Kind of like the way
love starts over coffee, the casual
brush of hands in a bucket of popcorn.
Your friends tell you he’s bad news,
but you still check out his tattoo,
run your finger across the ink
in the dark. You think about him
all the time. He’s growing on you,
but you know there may be a door
slammed somewhere down the road.
He may move in, make you eggs,
then one day, take everything.
So you cut him out. So you bleed,
scab. You wash your face, touch
the tender spots. You climb into
bed, worry that he’ll walk back
through the door, climb through
a window you forgot to lock.
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, Mulberry Literary, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.