Two Amy Winehouse Poems by Anthony Thomas Lombardi
The following is a section from the Epiphany’s Fall/Winter 2023, “Animalia” issue. To read more from the issue’s other excellent contributors, purchase your copy today in print or digital.
preparing for the next ice age while Amy Winehouse plays solitaire
Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.
- Lucia Berlin
you match kings & spades, queens
& clovers while my knees groan
on wood grain where I seal
splitting planks. I’ve known hunger
to crawl through slivers that starved
rooms of light, tongues so ripe
they’d rot in the arctic. on streets dazed
in dim lights I’d sell out
any lover who stanched my blood
flow where folks would kill
for a warmth this lonely.
when was the last time you felt
a wrist flutter, the beat of blood
that wasn’t your own?
when we gathered our stockpile
the man at the bodega who played
a sonata with the keychain
in his pocket brushed your arm
when he passed back your change.
word from the block: he still sleeps
with his late wife, an heiress
who spat diamonds with her hand
on the throne. I wonder if Queen Anne
ever took a common lover
riding steeds beneath crimson
skies, their handkerchiefs billowing
into hard-won dusk. even the bees, gifting us
the blush of her lace, would give
their lives to spill
some venom. forecast like a damn guillotine
I heard the man
mutter. clouds growing fat, wind whistling
like a blade grinding for a neck
to kiss. the calm that leads
the storm, you know well. you’ve received
the finest treatment that infamy can
offer, felt the West Coast
simmer before your insides screamed.
now your days in Rancho Mirage feel farther
than the horizon that yawns across
the bleary Eastern coastline.
how did you end up in this
moaning city? Jackie McLean blows
from the hi-fi’s dizzy spin, quickening
your pulse as the ocean cradles the sun.
you draw the jack of hearts & Lord
knows there’s never been enough men to fill
that open wound in your chest
& still you’ve refused to harden, backflipped
belly exposed, a lone pawn
courting tenderness, the branding
of a bruise. but resilience
be damned, winter arrives silent as a silo.
snow will fall with an intimacy near
violent. these bones don’t warm
like they used to. you’re starved
for more than blood. we’ve stashed enough
honey in the hive to last through
doomsday, yet the hymns
you hum rasp in your throat
with the grit of gunpowder. you haven’t spoken
to anyone, not even me, in days
but when I board up the windows
survival becomes a game played in pairs.
we’re outta smokes
what time you say the corner shop closed?
on her first tour in six years Amy Winehouse plays nothing but ballads & refuses to sing anything in past tense
ash-bitten by heatstroke
under house lights you move
through hallways backstage like it’s a sin
to inhabit your own skin
you pray to the dressing room mirror
record your defects in double columns
this all felt like instinct
when you were kissing a microphone
now you only lick notes
about the gap in your grin your face
bleeding out into an untethered moon
you part your lips split
like train tracks & almost expect to find
loose tendons stuck between your teeth
embarrassed by the intimacy you resist
recognition of your body
as a thing that can weep or combust
or decompose
there’s peril in picking up these shards
scars like knitted seams on your hands
they are not beautiful
so you count them like rosary beads
& isn’t this something like inventory?
a wounded animal you are attuned
to the prelude of storms
pulling down windows the darkness
blooms a reflection you can’t shake
you’d rather inhale the smoke
lingering like a presence
than whatever the clouds that follow
you have in store
you can still hear the applause
like a chorus of insects trying to fuck
before they die
there will be no encore
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Southeast Review, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, community programming throughout New York City, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared or will soon in Best New Poets, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.
