Poet, publisher, and Pushcart nominee Amélie Frank has authored five poetry collections and one spoken word CD. Her work has appeared in Art/Life, Lummox, Covid, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Poeticdiversity, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Levure Litérraire, Poetry Superhighway, Cultural Weekly, Wide Awake, 1001 Knights, Al-Khemia Poetrica, Don't Blame The Ugly Mug, Blue Arc West, Spectrum, Edgar Allan Poet, A Month of Sundays, Pacific Coast Poetry Series, Truck, Spectrum, 51%, fts, Dance of the Iguana, Scream When You Burn, Beat Not Beat, and Voices From Leimert Park Redux, Dear Bela, Beyond Baroque, and more. She has featured in such reading events as Poetry in Motion, BackStory, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, the NoHo Literary Crawl, Library Girl, Inspiration House, The Frank O'Hara Reading at MOMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and even Hooters Café. Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center and the cities of Venice and Los Angeles have honored her for her activism and leadership in the Southern California poetry community. She is a third-generation native of Los Angeles.
“. . . for her work, sacrifice, and contribution to the life of poetry and the life of the City, she is beloved.” Frederick J. Dewey
“I ain’t gonna let you sleep in no Walmart parking lot. That’s stupid!” Billy Bob Thornton
Doing Time on Planet Billy Bob Our poet takes a summer trip to Benton, Arkansas, where the movie SLING BLADE was filmed, and fulfils her vacation in the company of a complete stranger, all while recuperating from chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast cancer. The odyssey forges a cherished friendship with the stranger and thousands of cicadas.
The Essential Girl Set to music composed in the moment and recorded during the week following 9/11, this collection consolidates the author’s attempts to understand why she is bright, female, and so damned weird. She thinks her singularity is a practical joke God played on her. She won’t know she is autistic for another 5 years.
You can buy The Essential Girl directly from the author at poetamelie@aol.com.
Hebiko Ampersand: A Little Snake’s Story
This is my story.
It began with a cruelty.
I, Friend Snake, was a baby garter
who found herself inside
a grade school terrarium,
surrounded by children.
Spring break was approaching,
and the teacher had decided
to leave Friend Snake
in her terrarium to starve to death
over the Christmas holidays.
Friend Sage, a classroom aide,
heard of this, came running,
and snatched Friend Snake up,
sparing her a lonesome death.
Friend Sage gave Friend Snake
a new glass house
and a conch shell
for sleeping quarters.
It was nice.
Friend Snake was a beautiful thing.
Green and red threads forged
the beaded tartan border of her skin.
If you held Friend Snake between your hands,
she would relax and drape herself
between your fingers, making herself
a cat’s crade, a pretzel, a treble clef,
an ampersand.
Friend Sage named her Hebiko Ampersand.
Hebiko is Japanese for pretty snake.
In Sage’s hands, Hebiko curled
and doubled back on herself in beauty.
She sought the warm curtain of Sage’s hairline
as she gathered herself like knitting
on Sage’s left breast to listen to
the gentle, low music beneath
her clavicle. She traveled in the hood
of Sage’s sweatshirt, nestled in her lap,
dangled around her neck as
Sage fed and tended to her other pets–
the frogs and tortoise, river snails and tetra fish.
Snakes do not often get to feel love.
Hebiko, Friend Snake, knew love
because Sage would write to friends
on her computer and say of Hebiko,
“I love her.”
And she loved her little Ampersand
until one morning, when Friend Snake
unfurled from her conch shell bed
to breathe her last in her cozy glass house.
Friend Sage was bereft. She felt ashamed.
She did not know how to save a little snake.
This is what Hebiko wants to say to Sage now.
“This morning, you found me
on the floor of my glass home
bleeding from the mouth.
You thought it was your fault.
You thought you had broken me.
With a worm or with a word,
you thought you have broken me
been stupid or not treated me
with enough respect.
This is not what happened, Friend Sage.
I caught a common lung infection.
And then it was my time.
You loved me. You held me over the warm,
low music beneath your clavicle,
and you poured all your tears
into saving me. I could not be saved.
But you loved me, which was saving enough.
I had a lesson to teach you
and a lesson to learn from you,
and these are the lessons,
so listen carefully, my Friend Sage:
It is no more the length of my life
than the length of my body
that made the measure of my love for you.
It is enough that you broke
the frozen ground with your bare fingers,
splitting your nails to find me night crawlers
in winter for my favorite treats.
It is enough that you heard me call for you
from my prison at the school
and came for me.
It is enough that you made
a space for a tiny snake in a heart
still broken by the deaths of Dog Friend Chester
and Old Friends Jack and Scott.
It is enough that you loved me.
Please let it be enough that I loved you.
Please let it be enough that,
as I ceased to breathe, I felt your music
and heat pass into me and through me,
that I could taste your tears in the air,
and I knew they were for me.
Most serpents do not get to know God
because they do not get to know people,
nor do they want to know people.
Through you, I know God.
Because of you,
God now carries my soul
like a cat’s cradle in his hands
to that bright, unbroken place
where no cry unto heaven
not even yours for your pretty snake,
goes unheard.
Because of you, Friend Sage.
Because of you.”