Poetry by Amanda Ameen

Rust
 
the night you accepted that you will be raped again
you were on a fire escape with an old friend from college:
a philosopher, who told you that in all the years he knew you
he had been in love.
            then he raped you
            because you didn’t love him back.
then you watched him crawl through the window,
and when he was gone, you pulled off the dress he’d hitched up,
placed it beside the panties he’d pulled off you,
and felt the cold encase your skin.
there was rust
on the fire escape; iron poles and imprinted hands
nibbled by rain and cold.
when you cried, it wasn’t for you
it was for the girl you used to be,
who was raped by the friend of your mother,          
      when you were four    
                           and five    
                           and six    
                           and seven.
he opened you, mixed iron
with air and cold and the water between your legs
             until your insides corroded.
when you were done crying, you crawled back
through the window
            into the shower, and burned away the skin that the air that couldn’t freeze.

​



​A father’s Gaze
 
Opi, my mother said. she said i looked like my opi,
darker skin, darker eyes. But the same nose
and jawline, she said i laughed like him.
Is that what you saw? Or did you see the hips
of the syrianwomen you used to watch
down by Atlantic when you were ten and in Brooklyn. i was ten
and in brooklyn when you pressed your lips
close to my ear and said, she thinks she gets it from your mother.
We were walking behind a syrianwoman,
with hips holding tight the black cloth
of her burka. You were talking about my sister
who thought her hips were german,
given by our mother. But she’s Syrian,
you said. i guess it made her like you.
When you said that, she was thirteen,
And then i was thirteen.
Then i was sixteen. Were my bras
just cloth? The sort syrianwomen
wore; women with the jawline and nose
of your father-in-law?
i never knew your hands. But your hands
knew the cloth of the bras that knew my breasts,
that knew the touch of your gaze.
i was twenty when you saw the shape of my jaw
and the width of my hips.
And then remembered i was your daughter.
Your dress is beautiful, you told me,
tight around my hips
and green.
i haven’t worn it since.





anorexia
 
empty bellies don’t cry
they whimper, hide hunger
under skin stretched over rib
and hip. then they’re quiet.
i imagine this is what miscarriage
sounds like.

​



E:      Marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event(s), as
          evidenced by
                                     Exaggerated startle response, defined by broken wine glass
                                     in crowded living room after her lover made the mistake
                                     of letting his fingers press against blades
                                     of her back because that is how [normal]
                                     people say hello.




​Daddy


was what you called yourself long past the age of daughters sitting on a father’s lap.
i think of you and want to think of windex
thrown into my brothers eyes, or of the bookshelf i hid behind
the night you came into his room with a bat.
that night i learned to cry without sound,
silentbreaths taken through tinyfingers pressed against lips.
instead, i think of king-sized twizzlers lining marble coffee tables
beside the faux leather couch we knew to be yours. at night,
when your eyes were heavy with gin, you gave me the matching
chair, let me pull apart red candied strings bit by bit because at night,
you didn’t mind me playing with my food.
in high school, you called me pet.
spun stories of time spent filling missiles
in ships sent to the country whose name you didn’t like to say.
the war, you’d say. or sometimes just the seventies.
you never read the books i offered about soldiers who tread
the same grounds you sometimes saw in your head.
death was a being you said you knew well enough without
fiction. you never told my sister these stories. only me.
i was seventeen the night you told me to leave. i stuffed
two garbage bags with clothes and left
behind the electric piano you bought me a year earlier.
your death will be the order you never gave. you never gave orders.
you thought them.
i used to think you were psychic. around you,
beer bottles and knives could fly.

                                                 --pet
​

Bio: Amanda Ameen is a twenty-something-year-old college student from Brooklyn, New York who thought majoring in creative writing would make her super employable. She also studies psychology, and hopes to one day become a trauma therapist which, incidentally, is the focus of much of her poetry. Hobbies of her include closing her eyes at night and wishing she could be Kurt Cobain, Raymond Carver, or Franz Kafka, waking up, remembering these are unrealistic goals, and melting into a puddle of Netflix, old gangster movies, charcoal drawings, and books by dead Russian guys. 

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