Each Night I Throw You into the River

The water is clouded with choking sediments. There is no life

without light. The river moves quickly like it can’t be late, but it will never

arrive. Its banks are steep, the grade too vertical and the soil too soft

to scale from inside. I know you feel trapped.             So do I.

After you, I throw our books. Hundreds of them sitting on the surface

like water lily, their inks bleeding and covers warping, the poems inside

washing away as metallic trout and pigmented eels graze the melting

pages and our memories disperse to take up their haunting.

The twin mattress on which we first made love, an island so small

its slow erosion went unnoticed, it goes next into the river. I throw

the empty brandy bottles whose booze got us drunk together

when we were young. The photo albums and home cooked meals,

the couch on which we’ve napped for many long years. I throw it all

into the river. Even the whole day on which you carried my grandmother’s

coffin to the front of the dank church sinks to the suffocating clay beds

with the other poisons, the arsenic, the lead. The urge to throw myself

becomes so great that I have to throw that into the river too, the way

a spooked horse throws its dear rider because it can’t outrun the shades its seen.

Melinda Wilson is Managing Editor of Coldfront Magazine and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Manhattan College. She is author of Amplexus, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press. A graduate of The New School's MFA program and the doctoral program at Florida State University, she has published poems in Diner, Burnside Review, Valley Voices, Agriculture Reader, Verse Daily, The Cincinnati Review and The Wisconsin Review among many others. She co-curates the Poor Mouth Reading Series in Riverdale and Razor Blade Readings in Inwood.