In the movie, pioneers cross an arm of the Brazos and I think abrazos—how the river wraps wagons,
waves children into the past, past
parents whose visions of fertile pastures don’t include drought hardened soil unable to hold
dead children or wind-maddened women.
In one scene, prairie grasses strewn
with treasures, too heavy to carry across. A piano, now a wooden box
full of moonlight sonatas.
How many times in star-eyed darkness, naked, have I waded in shallows—
my thighs cold-rushed, singing. Chorus with the faithful: ripple and cricket.
≈≈≈
My ancestors traipsed from Dnipro, and its twin-named waters
River, from the Latin, riparius, ‘of a riverbank’ hence riparian—
habitat for those who congregate in its bounty.
But battered by the pogrom’s playbook they were sluiced elsewhere, unwanted.
Uprooted. Unmoored.
Faith from the Latin, fides. Fidelity. Their fleeing turned to trudge, a trust through mud, across
swollen flows, trousers and socks rank as sunflower stems flooded in a field.
Remnants of their fraught and fluid bodies raft in me.
≈≈≈
At ten I almost drowned in the Colorado’s ruddy rapids; the canoe ripped open by another river’s
onslaught, icy water around my neck, keel kissing the air, drybags and float cushions in a race
to some far bank. I grabbed the shattered boat and my drifting brother—how time and prayer
become non-existent—
≈≈≈
What is faith? Some days it’s a water-logged matchbook. Some days it springs
like a thought-less sister out of canyons, crevasses, an abyss, roaring
listen.
Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press was published in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in: The Missouri Review, SWWIM, and RockPaperPoems (all upcoming in 2024); Whale Road Review; Lily Poetry Review; JAMA; and elsewhere. She teaches expressive writing to caregivers through UCSF Wellness Center for Youth with Chronic Conditions and lives in Seattle.
