- Mar 22
- 2 min read
Thelma & Louise Attend Couples Therapy
What was it again, the sound of breaking death?
Here we are again, in love with fixing risk.
As coffee whistling without a stove. Our hairbrush
remembering the year it was a horse, hustling time
across our dresser, violently beautiful. Give us a sign
we're not just beauty, or violence immortalized;
that we're not codependent, not in trouble for turning
off the air conditioner in lesbian heaven.
What were we thinking, jumping like skin
out of a forever snow angel? Are you rewatching
our sacrifice, undeniably interested, like a child
sleepwalking into the kitchen during the second
splitting of a bright orange carp? Why did we urge you
to look? Desert sky drunk on unreciprocated patience.
Resentment our favorite emotion. The threat of being
cared for kicking off her jeans, leather jacket its own lover.
Is legacy the equivalent of touching each other's blisters
through the entire night? What we mean is, what's the difference
between a bloom and a bicep? We're taking you
somewhere you don't want to go, a story said back
to front, starting at the dead end. Are you sitting
in the driver's seat, ready to be swallowed
by our ocean's dice? Blink twice, we don't have
the answers. We're still debating who has our face,
belt, wink, gun. Who will use them. Who won't,
but who is bound so tightly to imagination
they survive, the way stars holepunch other stars
to build trust, a garden of misunderstood guts
flying in pairs.
AMANDA DETTMANN is a queer poet, performer, and arts educator who is the author of Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises. They earned their MFA in Poetry from New York University and have received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. 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. Their poems have been nominated for 2025 Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, appearing in publications such as The Adroit Journal, Fence 25th Anniversary Issue, Verse Daily, Yalobusha Review, and Stanford’s Poetry Journal Mantis, among others.