ADAMS
by NICO AMADOR
New England towns in late autumn
make a cold, unfurnished welcome.
Their pines lined up in stiff elocution,
white trim skirting the houses like lace
you refused as a child, a strange insistence,
and not unlike these deer congregated
at dusk, the voice inside you
accepting their beauty.
The ghosts here are not your ghosts.
They push through the damp bricks,
a vacant factory’s long conveyors, rusted
machines that once made war possible.
They peer out from their milky windows
as you skulk around, certain the past
wouldn’t find you here, that tomorrow
would show you another door.
You wanted to be a man
like your grandfather, who lived for his work
and the coin slot of his one garden.
There, the honeysuckle flourished,
rabbits dozed in their hutches.
Every afternoon, he washed himself
under the pooled light, absolved, somehow,
for whatever cog he might have been
in the teeth of another man’s wheel—
what wasn’t his to control.
You’re not constant like he was,
not with your own name, not with any place
or the face you show to it.
How could you be? Like him, I mean.
Men come in and out of your room like moths,
drawn to the warmth you offer, the novelty,
and you try, you do attempt to love them
in this narrow arm of the country –
it’s not where you’re from.
STUDY #1
by NICO AMADOR
How can I explain it?
I made myself into a deer.
A disappearance
or no, a leaping antonym.
An anonymous prince,
I’m poised here arranging
my crown, learning the parts
of an antler: tine, beam, pearl—
pale as a neck, ornamental, a vision
separate from the body
and the whole that completes
its description.
There’s so much contained
in this form I don’t recognize.
I throw myself against the moon
to see my silhouette, give it definition.
The moon, a made thing, too.
I teach it to sing behind everything
new and apparent, each desire
framed inside a paper field, the figures
called to the edges.
Lyric scent marked, declarative.
Do you follow?
I’m tracing the lines around
my own head my torso my legs
the light touching and erasing
what I ask. Language bends
like a staircase. The night turns over,
chases me out of the revolving shadows,
fresh with new awareness,
the markings of a common prey.
STUDY #5
by NICO AMADOR
Seeing one up close, more defined
than in that momentary impression,
the little window we’re permitted
through a flash in the headlights,
I understood it differently. The deer
was strange. He had a soft face, haloed
in white fur, a neck that lengthened
into a question, and his antlers—
not as I’d have drawn them: their shape
rounder, almost maternal. Behind us,
cornstalks rattled and hushed.
His gaze lifted, the skin under his ribs
twitched. The deer was a mirror,
every detail suddenly large and immediate.
The narrowing days funneled us
toward more exactness, this encounter
at the center.
Remembered another way:
He lifted my shirt. The room swelled.
Above us, doors rattled and shut.
A clamor hushed. I felt his hand slip
under my chin as the other pulled
my belt away. With the lights on, seeing
was like shouting into an avalanche,
that intense and total, undressed details
suddenly large and few. He touched
my ribs, shifted the balance of our weight
so I could watch myself beneath
his fingertips. My hair, the only dark.
Muscle, definition. It was strange,
knowing what he saw, a shape
different than I’d let myself imagine.
I reveled in that exactness, turned
toward his mirror. Behind us, the field
was a changing torch.
author pic here
Nico Amador is a writer, educator, and community organizer from San Diego, currently based in rural Vermont. Amador’s writing has recently appeared in the LA Review of Books, American Poetry Journal, West Branch, Pleiades, and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Anthology. His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a 2025-26 Emerging Artist Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
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