The 2River View begins its twenty-second year with new poems by Walter Bargen, Christopher Alex Chablé, Mary Crow, Morgan Eklund, Ceridwen Hall, Sarah Denise Johnson, Matt Mason, Frank Montesonti, Patricia Nelson, Phillip Sterling, Nina Sudhakar; and art by Thomas Park.
While you wait for the leaves to turn and fall, enjoy this poem from the upcoming issue.
Nina Sudhakar
We Are Not Made for Sea But for Sky
Mid-afternoon the waves pull back
the covers & force us to reckon with
the suddenly nude shoreline, exposed
grains & foolishly inscribed footsteps,
crustaceans reaching antennae into the
sunshine’s abyss. Rendering us all blinking,
half-blind, remembering how a day inevitably
finds us stripped naked at its end. It doesn’t
take much to recall the milkiness of an
underwater pulse, a vague & sweeping swell
like the world’s only truth glimpsed through
the clouded murk of a liquid curtain. The time
has come to hold our breaths, to swim for a
dim light in the distance, to throw the ocean
off our shoulders. I know we yearned for a
clean slice of oxygen, for unencumbered
breath. For the sacred placation of filmy
clouds, for that voidless, depthless expanse
of blue. Only beneath do I feel the low
throb-hum that turns float to churn, blur
to clarity, that tells me I’d do anything
to reach a solitary, untroubled surface.
Muddy Bank 