Today I fully inhabit my body,
Watching the sunlight brighten
Each flower on my pillowcase,
Then move across the hardwood floor.
I lie in bed and sip a cup of coffee
So pungent Sumatra sings in my bones.
Today I examine my travel companion
With childlike curiosity
As if looking at a squashed bug:
How odd are her angles and parts
That jut out, her sharp words for me
In a Chinese restaurant: “A fool uses
Chopsticks, a waste of time!”
How soothing are her rounded parts,
A resigned sigh as my car grinds down
Another hapless road kill.
Voyagers to a canyon’s lunar landscape,
I follow her path as she plows
Through phosphorescent green rocks
Then we bump up against a silence.
Accustomed to words, we struggle
To learn the sending of smoke signals,
Then finally the smokeless messages
That fly swiftest to the heart.
Travel alert: look, come quick
As a rainbow, huge and swollen
Rises from the river, slams
Into mountains miles away.
The rainbow clones and births,
A second, sister of the first.
We descend to the river
Where rainbow slivers sputter
And pluck a band of sunlight
To tuck between our dirty shirts.
Tomorrow when I’m in Portland,
She in Berkeley,
We will lift our suitcase lids,
Revive the rainbows
And our paths will cross again.
Judith Amber’s work has been published in the San Luis Obispo Tribune (annual poetry contests), Tolosa Press (creative non-fiction, short story), Oregon Coast Magazine, Fishtrap Anthology, Talus and Scree, Points in Case, Ravens Perch, and Evening Song magazine. In 2017, she won second place from San Luis Obispo Arts Council for a personal essay. In 1999, She won National Public Radio’s essay contest on “What Turned Me on to Classical Music,” writing about listening to Gregorian chants. She has been a member of SLO Nightwriters since 2006, served on its 2012 Golden Quill Writing Contest committee, and directed the 2022 Golden Quill Writing Contest.