—Zubair Ahmed
Rivers of Cities
She said, a friend, an engineer
worked the big tugboats
that push barges down the Snake
into the Columbia to grain
elevators in Vancouver. She said
he was becoming progressively hard
of hearing not from the engine room
noise which anyone would say
is deafening, not from the thrum
of the diesel like the current
of the river, like the flow of blood
coursing through his veins,
but, she said, the constant vibration
from the great beating heart,
an echo of his own, of
the tug was forcing him into
an increasingly silent world.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 2.
Carlos Reyes’s recent poetry includes: Osage Elegy (2021), The Ebbing Tide (2021), Lament for Us All (2021), Sea Smoke to Ashes (2020), Along the Flaggy Shore, (2018), Wrestling the Mistral (2022). Translations: Poemas de amor y locura/Poems of Love and Madness (2013). Memoir: The Keys to the Cottage, Stories from the West of Ireland (2015). He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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