The drowned girl attends class, her blasted eyes rolling back while someone drones on about unnecessary words.
Will she never get out of here? It’s 8:30 a.m. and she needs to become a nurse.
Her hair is Lake Erie wet and she is without pencil or pen. Her cell vibrates with emoticons.
How to get back. Surely, there’s a seam between the living and the dead you can pick away with your nails. Or something you can duck under like a curtain’s hem.
She outlines her lips very red.
How to get into her car. She’s used to floating along. How to make the long drive back to Lorain.
The boss won’t like it if she drips on the floor when she opens or gets the sweaters she’s refolding wet.
They’re all the colors of the lake—navy and slate and stormy petrel blue, tumbled by just-looking arms.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 15, Issue 2.
Susan Grimm’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Poetry East, The Seneca Review, The Journal, and other publications. In 1996, she was awarded an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her chapbook, Almost Home, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1997.
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