Some Days Landlocked Doesn’t Mean Water
- Some Days Landlocked Doesn’t Mean Water
-less or unmoving, but secured, heldtight in a place where every arrival takes
time, makes its own calendar we learnto live by, wait through. Other days
deep-end how & departure sinks us sothat we’re gasping for air or about to
give in to the way everything all but stops,that underwater slowing, that weighted
weightlessness. Others still, in our mouthsthose words held back so long become
what hums the distance between where& might be. You say some place unpaved,
somewhere flat, & I’m standing middleof there staring miles ahead into miles. [End Page 49]
MONICA BERLIN’s No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaborative collection of poems with Beth Marzoni, was published in 2015 by Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press. Her solo work appears in many journals. Berlin serves as associate director of the Program in Creative Writing and chair of the English department at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.*
