Turquoise
An
honest-to-god witch sent me turquoise in the mail;
The
stone dangles, heavy, divine,
from
the silver thread it came with.
I
keep it by my bedroom door, on a hook
with
my mother’s shiny black costume jewelry,
which
I realize now I never saw her wear,
and
which I’ve only worn once myself, in costume
I
said online I’d been chasing June bugs
across
the deserts of my dreams. Everything
means
something, right? So we continue to speak.
I
received a sacred dung beetle in answer, shit-roller
in
aqua, white fissures like someone else’s map,
a
prophecy. Turning effluent into something else,
into
something
I
want to be reborn, but not
like
this. I no longer
believe
evolution is a path
leading
out. My goals now are water
and
sky, slow kisses, coffee
at
the exact right temperature,
for
my child to want both more and less
than
I
Flow
Lao-tzu
said to be like water
so
drunk and desperate
to
belong, I leave
my
shoes at the shore,
wade
into the river,
and
begin to evaporate
The
scenery here sways improbably green between
slate,
against air exhausted by recent weathers
Wine,
in a glass, I was holding
onto
something, wasn’t I?
A
“No swimming” sign,
its
bullet holes, the illusion
there
is no highway past
that
crest of scrub and cottonwood,
despite
a constant shush against pavement
Everything,
here,
is
a chimera, I think,
except
intentions and the cold, cold wetness
shoving
at my shins. Maybe only one
can
be true at a time
A
shard of glass signals sunlight
from
the riverbank. Alberta stones stay sharp
against
my feet. The water and I remain too new here
to
wear anything down but ourselves
Poet,
editor and writer
Anita Dolman is the author of
Lost Enough: A
collection of short stories (2017), co-editor of
Motherhood in
Precarious Times (2018), and author of two poetry chapbooks. Her work has
appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including
Imaginary Safe
House,
Crush,
Arc Poetry Magazine,
On Spec,
Triangulation
and
Grain. She is a bi/pan+ rights advocate living on unceded
Algonquin land.
