For this good god grant me forgiveness for
my worthless living during during my entire lifetime
I couldn’t be less inventive if I tried
What is the trajectory if the virus now?
Eludes me like a task I still must do
To exit this concept real and imagined
by absconding piss babies, unwise Grandpas slapped
then flung laterally on the eyes, nose and mouth.
On this day of nationalist fervour
I be not Mercy, flying through the trees:
dioramas of thinning spirals that slide
on water then return back to us panting
and plumper than before, a force of nature splayed
there where, scientifically, I cannot be mercy

Amy De’Ath is the author of several short poetry books, and with Fred Wah, editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air.  (Banff Centre Press).  Not a Force of Nature  (Futurepoem, 2024) is her first full-length poetry collection. She also has a forthcoming critical book,  Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction  (Stanford UP, 2026) which proposes a new way of reading poetry based on Marx’s critique of value. Until now she taught contemporary literature and theory at King’s College London, but she recently moved to the US, where she will be Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University in Boston. She loves Buffalo and she often stays there, on Seneca territory, the home of the Haudenosaunee people.

Related Events

• On June 28th at 7:30 p.m., Amy De’Ath will join poet Graham Foust as featured performers at a Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event also featuring a musical performance by Allegra Krieger and an installation by visual artist Chuck Tingley. Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo-based bookseller Fitz Books.

The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.