First there was the statue, solemn there
beyond the gravel shore
where Ashley and I ate key lime pie pops.
I remember that. I told her someone ought
to take that stone pile of decency
and lick her on the lips I guess to make her laugh.
Second there was a fish flopping
there like a foot without the ankle.
It was so itself,
we were unnerved.
A girl with braids poked at it and a fisherman said
don’t know while he baited his hook.
Ashley and I made our hands a dish,
cast that fish back
not without noticing first how it’s scales shown purple
in the evening halo. The clouds were purple too.
There is a purple in here
I cannot touch. Purple stacks
of wind sweeps, set so close
like type face never touching.
Lady Liberty stops my mouth
from saying purple
and reaching
across the river, across to Ashley.
Instead the swish of water lulled us
it’s rehashed undulations.
What I know: clouds turn purple
before they turn yellow and then they rain.
What I know:
Some of the fish’s fish scales came off on our fingertips.
There is an East River
between this empirical world
and our breadbasket heads.
The world offers us worms.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3.
SarahJordan Stout is an actress and writer living in New York. Her poetry has appeared in Sleet, Rust+Moth, Connotation Press and others. Beginning this fall she will be pursuing a masters degree in literature at West Virginia University.
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