Kim Garcia is the author of The Brighter House, winner of The White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2015; DRONE, winner of the 2015 Backwaters Prize; Tales of the Sisters, winner of the 2015 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest; and Madonna Magdalene, released by Turning Point Books in 2006. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, Nimrod and Subtropics, and her work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Garcia teaches creative writing at Boston College. ---------
Come to me over the water
among pale lilies, palms of jade, lotus-fingered, water-soled. Come
and speak to me the beads of small kindness, which rise
from the mouth like the string of bubbles that rise how?
as fish rise as the great warm breasts of deep-heaving whale, as
the smallest slip in the school of light gathered in the weir O
encircling net, first tight and then O sea.
Come over the water to me. I am already coming towards you O
net O lotus O lily O water O
Passing
I was dead, no you
were dying. We wouldn’t last the night. There was nothing more
to do. Your hand, my incision--nothing sterile,
we understood this. After all, we said, one dies of one thing
or another.
Every joint is tender. I loosened the wire, I settled
the teeth in your mouth.
We were hopeless, so we made love in the other
world. We returned our bodies to their boxes, and touched
the river place where light kindles in water
and wavering, descends to the last, lovely bed.