Amanda Dettmann
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Temptation
Maybe a bit morbid, but I climb
inside the fridge to lick my future body.
Grip my pjs to cheat the cold like the girlfriend
I’ve never had. Dumb or brilliant, remind me?
No one has touched me in months. Blocks away,
the Little Dipper strips; a bowl of fake lemons
topples over. If heaven exists I will walk through
naked, a wisecrack, a ghost boy crying. Of sun, of revenge,
of men without mothers. But who am I without
this bought box: ice blocks my grandfather fell through
as a child. He’ll fear I’ll never marry. He’ll see my ego,
my pride, a woman inside a raindrop on fire.
Amanda Dettmann is a queer poet, performer, and educator who is the author of Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New York University where she taught undergraduates and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Dettmann was one of two finalists for the 2022 Action, Spectacle contest judged by Mary Jo Bang, as well as the winner of the 2023 Peseroff Prize in Poetry selected by Jake Skeets. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Emerson Review and has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Oakland Review, The Adroit Journal, Stanford’s Poetry Journal Mantis, and The National Poetry Quarterly, among others. Instagram: @manny_dettmann