fernweh
German (n.):
1. pain at the idea of staying home
2. home made in strange, unattained places
i offer my pillow tonight,
how you hold me beloved. you are pleasing and
unwilling. how
bones ache there, warm.
without the dampness
from rain:
without any particular
brokenness:
empty
where your marrow
should be.
does it matter
where i may go
while just now i rest
between your feet?
Feature Date
- December 22, 2023
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“fernweh” from apocrifa: by Amber Flame.
Published by Red Hen Press on May 16, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Amber Flame.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist whose work garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Her first poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published through Write Bloody Press. Flame is a recipient of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture’s CityArtist grant and served as Hugo House’s 2017–2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry. Flame’s work featured in Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She is Program Director for Hedgebrook, a residency for women-identified writers. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy in Tacoma, Washington, who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.
“An elegant, loving, and lovely journey. Again and again, apocrifa lifts us up, drops us, then lifts us again. Finally setting us down exactly where we need to be.”
—Jacqueline Woodson, 2020 MacArthur Fellow, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature 2018-2019, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Laureate 2018
“Enter this exquisitely delicate collection of poems and experience the tender tensions that shudder and shake the chords of love. Part love song, part dictionary of love, Amber Flame’s apocrifa offers us a language for love’s many faces and phases and allows us to bear witness to the lovers’ attempt to ‘sink and surface’ through love together; balancing the pull and tug of the desire to nest with one’s beloved and the itch of having ‘all the world still to taste.’ In these poems we are invited to feast on both the sweet glut of love and language and the agonies which can make ‘a whole desert in [our] teeth.’”
—Brionne Janae, author of Blessed are the Peacemakers
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