by Karla Linn Merrifield
Going upstream
testing our limits
canoe & paddles
on Rio Grande
Santa Elena
fatigues us with silt
no Border Patrol
no fence nearby
we edge exhaustion
grow thirsty
with nothing illegal
in our slow thoughts
just making a bend
surely as turtles do
nationality or species
unimportant
more shade desired
more water necessary
but canyon walls
mock us like ravens
we lumber along
elementally
between two countries
belonging only
to tiring muscles
our wasting pink skin
we trespass the silence
without clear borders
in this hot, sere land
accompanied by
thunder—clear warning
to go downstream now
strokes before heat strokes
we must go homeward
but where, how?
A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had poetry appear in publications such as CALYX, Earth’s Daughters, Poetica, The Kerf, Negative Capability, Paper Street and Blueline; on line in The Centrifugal Eye, Terrain.org, Elsewhere: A Journal of the Literature of Place, and Elegant Thorn Review, and in several anthologies. In 2006, she edited The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America, from FootHills Publishing; in 2007, FootHills issued her Godwit: Poems of Canada. She is poetry editor of Sea Stories and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. She teaches writing part-time at SUNY College at Brockport.
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