Red Channel in the Rupture

By Amber Flora Thomas

Red Channel in the Rupture is a gathering place for the troubling abuses of the past. Looking through the lens of the present moment, Thomas shows us the open palm necessary to embrace change, as she finds beauty in bodies gnashed, trapped, and crushed into change. Images and experiences bleed together as we confront with the poet the animal of loss and death. Moving through the aperture of landscapes and moments that have defined this poet, we discover the rupturing territory of time and change. We recover absolution for what has tried to kill our very souls. Here is the “endless rope” thrown out to all of us in our shame and fear; we would be wise to snatch this coil from the air.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781597096201

Amber Flora Thomas

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of two collections of poems: EYE OF WATER, selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and THE RABBITS COULD SING, selected by Peggy Shumaker for the Alaska Literary Series in 2011. A recipient of the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Prize, and Ann Stanford Prize, her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and faculty member. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. She was born and raised in northern California.

Book preview

Damaged Photos

You get into puddles with the sky

and when this fails

pit your girl against an ocean.

Choices blur and make off with rooms

in the whiteness. Winged enough to manage

your red kimono’s thirty-seven cranes in various

trajectories while you make the coffee.

You as God with rattlesnakes

and His Admiral Death holding down the muscle,

headless and breath swollen.

You scattered in her facelessness

behind the screen door, not frowning, not joyous,

just working her hands in a dish towel,

folding them away.

You as ether, over-exposed bursting place,

dulling with these selves, spun by light

and dropped into shadow places,

forgotten as you put the photos down.

An Opening

This morning the raiment

of a dead bat stops me

on the sidewalk, outside an abandoned

house on Main Street, and I find

my attention slipped

into narrow chambers

where a tutelage of insects

escapes. I stop,

though for clear horrors,

teeth cracked and ears

crushed to fish-scale, sun-rich

flaking. A brace too brittle

for thimble or spoon.

Velvet tufts gather in

my gaze and pocket

the lightness just the same.

Where waters diminished

to sand in the wing’s scuffing,

have closed, red unwoven

and stilled in ruptured channels,

sends salt as crystal

dust across my palm.

Parent shadows

fly out from the attic.

Poor bat, struck by the earth.

The Age of Forgetting

This happens with the rapture too.

Leaving your Birkenstocks and

brown sweater waiting at the chair

with a cold cup of coffee. A gift

of peacock feathers nodding in

a jar by the window. Served up

by science as brain atrophy. Shrapnel

misting cranial stars. Arias in