The Uncanny Valley by Amanda Nadelberg

March 12, 2015   The Uncanny Valley   Amanda Nadelberg

Fireflies careening the fields regardless of charm, without attention, jesters slid into the sea and time was forthcoming. There was a story being told. The lake asked nothing. (It was late and certainty required that you talk less or at the very least move over.) Under the song he said ‘no more peonies’ buttoned the door back on its frame, the street a ceremony in and of itself which made cars implements, plain miracles capsizing baskets in candied fields. The men and women were useful, abolishing daisies, and every time the band plays I’m Ursula wondering still at the door a terminal of the face (such is any incident on the way home) a field of aftermaths, a horizon because of boats. Cloth begot embrace while television considered fish, flowers by Mary and the fonts belonging to the post office coterie. While the room is recreated and the woods are just outside, denouncing, there’s styled behavior in the country in the city nonetheless, there are sermons in the sky, tonight, whole haggled systems, photographs abiding and I create nothing, I broke his collarbone and went away, listened to a song and pulled the world up around my head. Today is a long time in any number of places we don’t go. No one says thank you. They get older and they fake it whether or not we’re there.            Copyright © 2015 by Amanda Nadelberg. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This poem was written four and half years ago. I can’t remember much about the moments surrounding it, save for that I had just moved temporarily to the state of Massachusetts. Near my parents’ house there is a white, canopied cart that says ‘flowers by Mary’ and it has a little locked box that honest people put money in, to pay for small floral arrangements.” —Amanda Nadelberg   Amanda Nadelberg is the author ofSongs from a Mountain, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2016. She works as an editor and lives in Oakland, California. Most Recent Book by Nadelberg   Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House Press, 2012) "Our Valley" by Philip Levine "A Small Hot Town" by Collier Nogues "Useless Landscape" by D. A. Powell Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.