A Match-Cut Feature

by Hannah Smith & Amanda Maret Scharf


A lens zooms in on everything 
I might miss: the frost I hold beneath
my fingernails. It came knocking
long after the blinds were drawn,
a diversion from the path left by a forward-
thinking stranger. 

*

Morning light sears 
its way into this bedroom. 



Not a single canary 
left in the coal mine. Flight was a force
I had seen in the movies. But then, 
you know, capitalism entered 
its budding fucking head.

*

They decided the song would be named a hymn—
a lesson in romantic semantics. Scary, 
isn’t it? The way we can bury some parts 
whole. Now, the embers fade 
into grass churned and muddied 
by my mother’s thumb, the view 
finder. I was too stubborn to notice

new growth, what used to be beautiful,
busting down the door. These are the stories 
I tell myself of what it looks like 
to be fine and fine and fine, stuck 
in this obstinate guilt. 

*

I build myself a new narrative.

*

I peel my palms 
apart from this gesture
called prayer, confront one open hand,
then another. Absorb the scent 
of the shifting season cataloged 
in the cigar box trapped behind glass.


Amanda Maret Scharf (she/her) is a poet from Los Angeles. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, Fugue, Sixth Finch, Willow Springs, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her work has been exhibited at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair at MOCA under her artist collaboration, mixedgreens. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Ohio State University where she serves as poetry editor for The Journal.

Hannah Smith (she/her) is a writer from Dallas, Texas. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Ohio State University, where she is the Managing Editor of The Journal. She is a Best of the Net nominee, and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Image, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere