5 February, 2025

Turn on the Sink

Whenever a man follows me too close,
I think of my Nana scrubbing out my father’s mouth

with clementine soap, like a mudslide in frosted tip
southern California, just after the Ham Man stopped

by on Christmas Eve to deliver their annual lump
of cinnamon crusted gorgeous fat—

how when anonymous footsteps don’t pass
me on the sidewalk but shuck themselves into shadows

I replay my father punching through his sister’s
Brady Bunch drum set, his bottom lip the border

between pleasure & punishment, that smirk before
suds swallowed, the purpling passed down paint-by-number

of our family’s jawbones canoeing around each other
but the water is frozen, the water is frozen.

Amanda Dettmann

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 in FENCE, The Oakland Review, Portland Review, The Adroit Journal, Stanford’s Poetry Journal Mantis, and The National Poetry Quarterly, among others.

Contributions by Amanda Dettmann