by Lana Bella
After Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”
All the while the river rushed, so
has everything else. Shivering
through a late winter leave, I felt
the paranoiac quiet traced down
the folds of my bones wading
beyond the water, gin memory
pulled up by Xanax and opiates,
indigent words caught through
sieved tubes of glass. Some say
the arrows of fear and loneliness
can swarm shadows of pelican
plants under fits of sun, blooms
wrenched open by the hands of
need, honey so fraud and heavy
all things must break before they
fold. Armored in the sheer bulk of
weeks, years, decades, I mapped
of stars with the whole sky taut in
my fists, and still, my legs cannot
hold the weight of bones in place,
like cigarette felled between fingers
to melancholic disgust, silvering
in the offing when I stretched to
roots where dark intaglioed home.
Category: Poetry, SNHU Creative Writing, SNHU online creative writing