Amanda Auchter         

Jezebel To Her Husband
2nd Prize Poetry Contest 2006

For you, I bare myself to an eye of moonlight
against the tongue of a smoldered sky.

My Ahab, I am a line cut through our city.
I whisper Baal into our bed, prayers for you,

my dead. I imagine you in that burnt underworld:
black hands, black feet. Here, someone lights

a candle for you and calls me wicked. At night, a torch
flames our dry dust, the window. Without you, I grow

earthward from bird-darkened air that dips into
every surface (the pitcher, a broken brush, my dress).

I draw into a swell of stone, a rise of twisted knots.
There is never enough god for the living.