Amplitude No greater fox-ness than against the white sunlit brilliance of ice: fox glowing silver bronze gold as it glides in front of us, paw-perfect over the jagged freeze stretching far across the lake. We cannot look away, just like the time we turned in unison walking in Kyoto, to find a 500-year-old pine, a giant bonsai that spun us to it as if we were magnetic. That day was sultry, but the tree glowed as the fox does today, their draw a primal kind of light, its wavelength so long as to be almost sound – fox infrared, tree pulsing to a beat inside us. And both times, you and I adjacent, thrumming, our brightness augmented.
Lisken Van Pelt Dus teaches languages, writing, and martial arts in western Massachusetts. Her poetry can be found in many journals, including most recently Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Book of Matches, Split Rock Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies such as the Crafty Poet Anthology Series, as well as in her book What We’re Made Of (2016). A new chapbook, Letters to my Dead, was released in 2022.
Amethyst Review 