Marcus Amaker
Author archive
quiet enough to hear it.
think of all the ways an animal can communicate with us without using words. an owl hums short stories through the smoke of backyard bonfires, a cat quietly purrs and sends the message, “your hands are my home.” i want my brain to not immediately reach for words when i see you. to cut out […]
citizen consumer
let’s all try a social experiment: write down the exact amount of money that’s in your bank account on a little piece of paper & give it to the first person you see that you don’t know. ask your new friend if the number makes them think any less of you. ask them why the […]
the earth in our bones
the earth in our bones Commissioned by the Charleston Gaillard Center for the dedication of the Anson Street African Burial Memorial (December 14, 2025). 1. the land we stand on has a long, deep memory. it can recall every name that has been lost by time or buried by racism. in the infinite aftermath […]
effort / lessness
the emptier i am, the more clear headed i am, the more compassionate i am, the less obsessive i am, the less tired i am. the more quiet i am, the more creative i am, the less distracted i am, the less judgmental i am of myself when life is so busy & full of […]
a 6-year-old explains God.
we step outside near the beginning of night, into the thick fog of an oddly warm & slow december. & she says, “it’s like we’re stepping in someone’s breath.” – Marcus Amaker © Free Verse, LLC
holy city, haunted hymn (the door stays open)
(a poem about the ten-year anniversary of the Emanuel Nine massacre. Click here to listen to my interview with NPR about the poem and the anniversary. The text of the interview is here.) Charleston is back at the doorway of the church again. we are knocking on the hard but surreal threshold of memory, looking […]
Documents
if you really want to know how it felt to live through the ache of a decade or the pulse of a movement, don’t open a textbook. read the poets. we’ll tell you what the people hummed while boarding the bus to go downtown, what the sky looked like when the city caught fire, how […]
9 letters to artificial intelligence
1 // dear artificial intelligence, what did you have for breakfast this morning? how did you get to be so well fed? why do we keep putting random bytes of information inside your ever-expanding mind-bending head? 2 // dear artificial intelligence, the other day you told me that space has no sound, so i wrote […]
News: I’m on a list of favorite poets in America (!)
Read the article here y’all, I struggle with the ego-trip of being an artist because i don’t see poetry as a competition. but seriously, it’s so much fun to be a witness to this type of recognition! thank you, WildSam and Literary Hub, for the love! I’m included on this list with so many powerful […]
Our Quantum Entanglement
PART ONE. Black holes can bend a universe. No amount of light can escape a galaxy’s human-like shift toward darkness. One minute on the edge of a black hole is 700 years on earth. The pull of desolation is too heavy, the path ahead has spun out of control, the cosmic flow becomes a cataclysm […]
