“Abandoned Fair” by Amy Newman

February 7, 2025Posted by

Amy Newman

ABANDONED FAIR

Our love is an abandoned fair:
the lights all broken on the midway,
some glitter still hung in the air.
 
We strolled like kids. We weren’t aware.
We satisfied ourselves all day.
Our love is an abandoned fair,
 
though painted horses galloped there,
beneath—I cringe at the cliché—
some glitter, still hung the air,
 
those sparkles of our wear and tear,
silver distractions. What did I say
our love is? An abandoned fair,
 
an image of what mattered there—
gold, right? (See in a tossed bouquet,
some glitter still.) Hung in the air
 
like a promise? Nope. Nothing there.
Just sparkly garbage and decay.
Our love is an abandoned fair.
Some glitter still hung in the air.
 

—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024

__________

Amy Newman: “One summer after graduating from college, I was working as an assistant to a stylist in Manhattan, dressing models for photo shoots and television commercials. It sounds glamorous, but I felt very alien in that world. One morning, I was on location in an apartment on the Upper West Side, surrounded by people bustling about and by shopping bags full of items to collate and eventually choose to dress the talent. I noticed, on the coffee table, an issue of the The New Yorker, opened it, and turned to ‘In Passing,’ a poem by Stanley Plumly. I had studied poetry in college, and I had thought all of that—reading and drafting poetry—was behind me. But as I read the poem, everything changed for me: the studio, the bustling, the feverish atmosphere, all fell away. After I read the final line, I looked up from the poem again, and I was surprised to be back in that studio. I felt so moved, and so found for that moment, that I decided to go back to college to study poetry.” (web)

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