To make something far grander than yourself, to expand the bounds of experience and mere matter, attach iron bit to iron bit to reel and soar, better than anyone believed of you. Erected at earth’s edge, a cantilevered assemblage of engineered dreams, the great wheel lifts children from their customary plane for a few coins and belief in human progress. With a bright tune masking the mechanical, the wheel advances the clock to the vertigo and vantage of midnight. The world below looks distant and strange, and the children, masters of a vaster circumference.

Amanda Yskamp’s work has been published in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Georgia Review, Boxcar Review, Rattapallax, and Caketrain.   She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, where she teaches writing from her online classroom.