WELCOME TO OUR MONDAY MORNING FEATURE. We hope to share with you our readers the songs of the River, that they may either start your work week off right or recharge your batteries after a long weekend with the custys… We heartily accept submissions via email.
OLD GEAR by M.Toughill
Digging out my paddling gear,
Smells of river must and beer.
Each piece tells a story just for me
Friends and places stored in memories,
And the patches and the wear they bear
Are crosses from the path I walk
The path I paddle.
And it’s been a good long while,
Boating mile after mile.
Years have come and gone along with friends,
We drift apart like water round the bend.
Yet the times we spent might fade like gear,
But never fade away.
They remain unchanged.
WHITEWATER
Melissa Stein
kayak flipped us and the current
dragged us through its rocks, arms sealed
at our sides, it was a blast, meeting it all cranium-first,
like academics, frothfoamgrit and the taste,
what was it, asphyxiation, psychedelic Escher
in blackwhite cubes, tableau enormous, picnic
tablecloth but undulating, spiked into color—crimson, canary—
until that last blow, ledge flat against
my mouth-hole, my whole body
condensed to one blinding exclamation point,
white protrusion of bone— white petals and light,
pearl-solid, luminous, all fourth-of-July and scattered,
pipe bombs bottle rockets Christmas crackers, oh,
what a party, annihilation, till the blue blue blue
palm sweeping my forehead, the hair from my forehead
and the ache of return, to the tenderness
of paint sable-brushed against silk, powdered
throat of the foxglove, flushed curve spiraling
into a conch, velvet crowning the doe’s nose,
arms embracing the cello’s hips, shoulders,
and what shudders from them, coaxed
or forced, distracted out of, with that bloodwhite flap
blinking at me from your cheek
and something in the eyes, maybe trout or bass or salmon
thrashing upstream, yellowglimmer and sickened,
we’re not going to make it, we’ll make it, we’re stranded,
washed up on this hurricane shore, held together
by blood sticks and mud, oh paper, oh desks, oh treatises,
we weren’t immune, on those banks, sky flat as anything,
a willowlike spider tree bending over us,
I focused on its branches, on the branches
of the branches, how comical that word twig,
surrounded by thousands of jokes as blood darkened
the silt like a cave painting.
Whitewater rafting by Sean Cafferky
How do you say goodbye to forever?
Trampling on the memories,
crushing each one underfoot.
Perhaps the crimson shooting stars
of autumn are from the Tree of Life.
We take turns in a somber dance,
breaking up the fallen memory of one another.
How do you?
I don’t.
Simply close my eyes
to dam up the coming
of whitewater rafting.
Sometimes I sink in
the torential outburst.
Flailing, kicking, screaming.
Dreaming.
Of the shoreline.