Amy Miller
RESISTORS

He taught me how to bend their arms
so they stayed. To solder them
solid with lead and resin, perfect
alchemical drops. Each striped
in mathematical candy—purple
for seven, green for five—it took
a simple decoder. But how
to speak to me, his daughter
striped in a thrift-store skirt
and punk shoes, this was more
like the keening barrel rolls
of his cropdusting days.
He showed me the logs,
brown old books with his pencil
scratch: take-off, touch-and-go,
spins, loops, spins. Then back
to the workbench to assemble
more boards, the great dumb
heads of capacitors looming
over the little resistors,
all of them holding on.

Amy Miller’s full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award and will be published by Concrete Wolf Press in 2018. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA, and her chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). Her poem “Mountain Guide” appeared in Issue 16 of Cleaver. She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, and has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and 49th Parallel Award. She lives in Oregon. More information at her website.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #20.