Aubade

By Amber Flora Thomas Amber Flora Thomas

I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.

Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust

crumbled. You push me back into bed.

More “honey” and “baby.”

Breath you tell my ear circles inside me,

curls a damp wind and runs the circuit

of my limbs. I interrogate the air,

smell Murphy’s Oil Soap, dog kibble.

No rose. No patchouli swelter. And your mouth—

sesame, olive. The nudge of your tongue

behind my top teeth.

To entirely finish is water entering water.

Which is the cup I take away?

More turning me. Less your arms reaching

around my back. You ask my ear

where I have been and my body answers,

all over kingdom come.

“Aubade” is from Eye of Water: Poems, by Amber Flora Thomas, © 2005. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Eye of Water: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

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 . . .

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