1.
Not stones, not stalks, not fallen branches,
nor some disturbance of water by feeding fish.
On the far side of the glassy gray-brown river,
a good forty geese flock in the shallows.
They are stipple in a watercolor—reflection
of the bank’s green. Or a slow flux, bubbles
propelled by the slightest breath across water.
Even a parade of neon windmills, kayaks
wagging their blades, does not disturb them.
2.
A wonder none of us ever drowned.
My mother laughing, telling the story
again—Gulf coast summer heat,
the treacherous log flume,
the rush of brackish water,
no lifeguard, no lessons, no ladder.
Swimming they called it,
she and her cousins, all boys,
though a panicked flail and gasp
was what it was. I could never
figure her laughter. I can’t
3.
imagine the ovum that with my father’s thrust
would become this body, already there,
a little moon shining in the night like a secret,
a tiny pearl packed among her sisters, a world
emerging lucent from the face of the deep,
floating there in my mother’s placid waters.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Kathy Nelson is the 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize (Five Points, a Journal of Literature & Art). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Along with her two chapbooks, Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, her work has appeared in numerous journals, including LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She lives in Nevada.
See all items about Kathy Nelson
