At the party the body of the young
man makes me look
I look
The lean uninflected flesh of the belly
This casual skin
Men looked
Now I look
The boy dives in the water,
then otters back, smiling at me
He doesn’t know that bodies
can empty like jars
He doesn’t know that I am
pine-harrowed, incomplete
Doesn’t know that I taste of quinine
and dandelion greens
Amy Newlove Schroeder's first book, The Sleep Hotel, received the Field Prize and was published by Oberlin in 2010. Her poems and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades. She currently lives and teaches in Los Angeles.
