Poetry By Amy DeBellis

      Dave Cowley CC



Vesuvius Pulse

I think that if I kissed you, it would taste
like rust or moss. Something that forms 
when no one is looking. 

You teach me how to load a gun,
how to hunt duck and rabbits and quaking deer,
but I long for something larger, I dream 
of bears, boars, bison:

bodies colossal 
pierced and falling to earth.

In the evening the fields turn leaden 
gray like my parents. My father dying sunk
full of silver morphine. 

No deer here, only a neighbor’s cat 
slinking through wheat thinking herself 
unseen. I watch us watching her, everything
the color of ghosts. 
Everything with a heart fair game.

Soon the woods will turn murky and raucous with dark.
You smile, a trap twisting shut.


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Amy DeBellis is from NYC and has had a poetry collection published by Thought Catalog Books. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books.