Groundless
Amanda Ranth
Here there is an ache
Drawing to the surface
All her sisters
Crying to be heard
Like babies wailing
Like the undigested past
Like Memories of
Of funerals and frailty
Here we face our own mortality
In a mirror every day
We brush her teeth
Tie her hair back
Tidy up the trauma
Show up to our lives
Here we make breakfast
Avoid the headcount
Try not to panic
When we burn the toast
It seems there is less room
For error these days
There is less room for life
As we become rigid in the face
Of so much flux
As we hyper vigilant
Against the groundless
It’s easier to believe in
business as usual
When we have two ply
And paychecks
Harder when everything is uncertain
Security was always a bad guest
But you still make the bed up
With the good sheets
With the mortgage
With the 401k
The truth is
It doesn’t matter why the buy in
illusions don’t care
How you prepare
They dissipate as soon as the
Power chord rips free from the wall
And now we are ungrounded
And dangling from a branch that
Will not hold our weight
We wait for the next
Unknown thing
Upside-down
And upside down is
The perfect position for birth
Even here there is death
A swirl of uncertainty
Before the crowning
A moment of miracle
And mystery
Where everything is liquid
Just before the light
Amanda Ranth is an activist, poet, performer, and visual artist whose background is in the street theater and storytelling. She enjoys blurring the lines between poetry and music, performer and audience. Ranth is the author of several chapbooks including Seeds and Sleepless Nights and Skinless Woman. Her work has been showcased at Queer Gather of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; One Flaming Arrow: Intertribal Art, Music and Film Festival in Portland, Oregon; and locally at MING Studios, Storyfort, and at the Boise Art Museum’s Tall Tales exhibit. An Idaho native, she currently resides in Nampa where she wanders the edges of wilderness with the Cooper’s hawks and swallow tails.