Instructions for Brio & i planted you
Amanda Rose Koenigsberg
Instructions for Brio
Take up my waters, the salted caves
home to bats and our childhood.
Bury a scrap of seaweed and a
crabs leg next to my father’s grave,
it was his last wish to be part of
an underwater feast.
If you can find the empty bottle of Rich n’ Rare whiskey,
stuff it with the sand dunes we used to graze and adopt as our
afternoon nap residence every summer.
When sand dollars get lonely they lift their sesame
wafer bodies and wait for plankton
or the closeness of fondness.
Open my copy of The Odyssey and
replace the line “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”
with
I’m sorry I missed last Christmas
Raid my tin cans of dried fruit.
Begin with blueberries and place one every ten feet
from the back porch to the Chitwan rivers of Nepal.
Beg me then, to answer the question,
do we begin in prismatic ideas
or in heaps of old walnut shells?
i planted you
I planted you in the sand, a granule, an oceanic seed. We found a coin outside your house four
years ago when I walked you to your door after work. You saw something in the
driveway, small and old with worn edges, like it’d been run over by a lawn mower.
It’s from Barbados, I told you. My best friend had similar coins on her kitchen
counter when we were little. You handed it to me along with instructions: tell it
everything you hate about the world and bury it somewhere. I nodded, but kept in
a copy of The Paris Review until this past winter when it fell to the floor.
I made that three-hour drive to the coast and sat by the water cradling the gold wafer in my palm,
the weight of a newborn sparrow and tarnished hue of weary pipes. I told it how your blonde waves
would spill across your face when you leaned over your desk reading stacks of screenwriting
memoirs. I told it how you used to rest the tips of your fingers on the back of my hand,
nonchalantly, a fallen leaf on a front lawn, a car idling in the red zone. I told it that I couldn’t
accurately describe the blue of your eyes, but I could paint the greying bruise on your right cheek
with the hue of cornflower and moldy blueberries. I told it how I wished I went after that old car
of yours, how I watched your headlights shrink into themselves and tuck into that left turn you
made. I bargained with the coin to trade the foggy cache of your laughter and lingering hugs with
your voice.
I watched as preludes of nomadic foam carried you under. Your skin, a coin, salted brine—
a trifold curtain of aching light.
Amanda Rose Koenigsberg
Amanda Rose Koenigsberg is a queer poet living in Los Angeles who recently obtained her Master’s in Creative Writing from Loyola Marymount University. Her work is often rooted in the verdant familiar and the fantastical. She often seeks to capture the meeting point between grief and euphoria though quietude, intentionality, and synesthesia. Her work has been published in several small presses throughout Los Angeles. She is currently working as a high school English teacher in Gardena.