Today’s Poem
River --Ginger Murchison
Late afternoons, we'd tuck up our hems under Minisa Bridge, scrape our white knees on scrub brush and drowned trees to slide
down the dirt bank past milk-weed gone to seed, cattails and trash to sit on stones at the edge of the river and giggle and smoke,
waiting to wolf-whistle North High's rowing team. In the shadows where the milk-chocolate river unfolded, ooze between our toes, we'd strip,
risk long-legged insects, leeches and mothers for the silt slick on our thighs, the air thick with the smell of honeysuckle, mud—the rest
of the day somewhere downstream. We didn't know why, but none of us wanted to go home to polite kitchens and mothers
patiently waiting for what happened next, the way women have always waited for hunter husbands, kept vigils and prayed at the entrance of mines.
