river

meditations on the death of summer

/ joanna / 8 Comments

fog curling
off the water makes me feel

like falling
off the world; some-

times it’s damn hard
to feel at home here,

the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,

in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive

as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where

the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman

and tossed in God’s wastepaper
basket. we dream

of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn’s

bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday

mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair

in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.

love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing

/ joanna / 19 Comments

the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.

many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round

the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands

sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,

i know the herons aren’t
in the trees. they’ve found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.

epitaph for the soulless

/ joanna / 16 Comments

there are

wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this

was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched

into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings

in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-

current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth

dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each

rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,

this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.