local_library We find an empty part of the river

by Jessica Lakritz

Published in Issue No. 190 ~ March, 2013

brown at its wide mouth

far enough that the bongo drummers

and tambourine players

 

won’t bother to see

beneath the copper sunset

lovers bobbing with soft waves

 

gulping in air between mouths

full of the other

and afterward

 

what remains will open like moonlight

over the water like the wild

shapes of desire and distance

 

ships ablaze at sea

like the blur of molecules around that fire

and the jumping shadows on the water’s surface

 

or perhaps left over will be nothing more

than a quick coalescence of chemicals

and whatever else has loosened from us

 

like ghosts hungry for abandon

will wash to shore nameless

with the fractured husks and bones

 

of fish dead a thousand years

learning the depths of other

lonelier darknesses.

 

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Jessica Lakritz has an MFA in poetry from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published in Third Coast, Northwind, Shady Side Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is currently amidst a half-year writing sabbatical (from her serving job in Portland, Oregon), living in a small fishing village on the Pacific Coast of Mexico with her dog, Luna.