Paper beats rock
Rock beats scissors
Scissors beats paper
Water beats them all
The river runs with scissors
like a child laughing
in whitecaps
Laughing so hard
it capsizes the airboats
sent to save families and pets
Clenching its fists of ice
it smashes the rock
in highways and dams,
the metal in bridges
and grain bins
until they crumple like paper
and are swept away
Jackie Fox’s work has appeared in Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, The Fem, Tar River Poetry, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, and other journals and anthologies.