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FOR MY SISTER IN THE RIVER I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. —JOHN : I was trying to be cruel when I threw the rhododendrons in her hair. It was spring and the petals were sticky, bruised and crimson against her dark hair, but instead of crying she laughed, spun herself into this photograph of a girl dancing in circles so fast her body blurs, her head a deep magenta and earth. My sister is small and stronger than she looks. In a decade she’ll arrive late at the door, her lip split, eye swollen shut, her baby girl blushed with tears (wound around her like a delicate vine.) She’ll walk into the kitchen, sit down on linoleum, say I’ll never go back. I’ll want to believe I hear her voice filling with her voice from the river we swam as girls, where we’d take turns being John the Baptist, drenching each other in the muddy tide. Underwater, I could feel my sister’s skinny arms straining to pull me through currents, lift me through the dark surface, press her fingers to my forehead, say You’re forgiven. You’re healed. We were too powerless to be prophets. I don’t mean halos appeared above us in the river, or the kitchen was lit by anything other than streetlight lost from the roads outside, just that we knew, without psalm or song to guide us, we had to save each other.  ...

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