"The Saginaw River"
by
Corie Calcutt
The bottle-green water shimmers
under a crimson-brushed sky.
When the wind hits just right,
the lingering scent of
watered-down dead fish
trails through the nostrills-a happy smell.
Seaweed wraps like spidery chains
arround your ankles as
your feet plunge thigh-deep
into the spongy brown slime.
Once, the water was blue,
and I remember vaguely the sight
of the simple wooden dock
that stood stock-straight from our yard
out into the downstream,
hedged by broken cement shore
and snowy cotton boughs.
The dock is there no longer.
Only the rotted corpses
of carp and catfish remain,
buried under the waist-tall weeds.