Amy Laessle-Morgan
Opaline
My heart
has become a small outlaw of an organ
savors every recklessness
like black sequins drifting across bathwater
gone gray and circling the drain.
How I long to be more opaline—
to refract, not reflect.
To become the thing light has to work its way through
slant and split around.
I’m always telling some stranger or ceiling or notebook
that if I could just tilt the glass right
they would finally see what I really am.
Not transparent,
not brick-solid either
but that milky in-between
that refuses to give up
the whole story all at once.
I am not here to be read clean.
I am here to be held up
opal-troved—
just water, silica and voids
throwing off color
as if seeing were believing.
Amy Laessle-Morgan is a poet based in Southeast Michigan and the author of the poetry collections East Coast Heartbreak and Live Wire. Her work has appeared in Gypsophila Art & Literary Magazine, Sterling Script, Poetic Reveries Magazine, Artifex Literary Magazine, Squirrel Cane Press, Azarão Lit Journal, and Two Key Customs Press.