Diana Reaves grew up in southern Alabama along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation, where she was a Walton Fellow. Her poems have most recently appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Meridian, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Raleigh Review. She lives and teaches in Gastonia, North Carolina. ---------
Riverbank Revival
We rest against sun-
bleached lawn chairs,
raise warm whisky’d-up
pine needle tea
to the half moon—our mugs
like winter chimneys
panting. Later we heave
rocks; pitch our wishes
into dark water; watch
mollusk shells sweep
downstream, our breath
eddying, spirit-charred.
Brother and sisters,
we sing At the river
I stand; guide my feet,
hold my hand. Take my hand,
precious Lord; lead me
home. Sister stares into clouds:
Y’all do that one if I die first.
*
I know that feeling when
you listen to doves’
early pining as eggs sputter
happily in the pan, to a wind
chime’s trills in the midst
of thunder and rain
plinking a tin roof.
All those notes at once.
*
Our friend Bo drowned
in the river years back,
lived again. Some stranger
fishing by the dam pulled him out.
I’ve never asked him
if he fought for very long,
or if it just happens
like they say:
Do you let the water in?
Are you at peace suddenly
standing sun-bleached
outside yourself watching
a nighttime current summon
the old vessel farther
down, reaching for nothing,
swept away in voices
of foam and churning, boulder,
loose root—all those notes
at once? Have you been made
ready to leave the earth behind?
Run out of breath and left
lonely for a home
only the sky affords?
Nocturne for Sister
We take the shortcut home, the way
we did as girls, trespassing
on the Lanier farm and edging
through the hay bales fat
like spools of twine thrown
out into the fields.
Beside the fence, we joke
we’re too old, grab ahold
of each other, bowing at
the starry altar of barbed wire.
Used to, we’d slip ourselves
right underneath without a snag.
And now in our winter coats,
our scarves catch rusty
barbs and we shake with laughter
so deep it’s silent:
we’re stuck, grown women
down in the dirt of years
unable to breathe. We turn for the woods
waking a gray fox,
her body a nest in the bare oak.
She lifts her sterling muzzle
from sleep—tawny ears rigid
against the twilit fog—
and leaps quicksilvery into the forest
brush where she dissolves,
a confession in the dark.
I think again of the night
I left you behind me, Sister,
ran ahead, how I’d been
running from you already—
long legs, the overnight miracles
of breasts, lip gloss, perfume,
locking you out of rooms.
When I turned back, you looked
so small on the trail.
I took your hand—you snarled
I hate you I wish you would just die
and clawed my arm, so deep, silent.
Maybe you’ve forgotten how
you walked beside me in a fog of hate
the whole way home, my arm still
bleeding, you heaving,
unable to breathe.
Part of me wants to ask
if you remember, but I’m afraid
you do. You’ll say you never
meant it, but I want you to
mean it, to—even now—
still hate me then
and have someone who somewhere
in my life loved me
like that, with such abandon,
unleashed and rigid, wishing me
dead before I dissolved or ran so far
ahead you were lost without me.
With running starts we leap
the creek and near it kneel
to tracks so small on the trail, moonlight
unraveling across them
down in the dirt, years
of everything we’d wished for
frozen hard in this ground,
our scarves reaching,
reaching in the wind.
Voice Lesson
A girl singing scales
at the piano
Mother
instructing me to lie
down you’re still
reaching for the notes
step on them
her hand against
my stomach waiting
for my belly to swell
her hand rising then
sinking as I
exhale the soprano
line a wheeze
clumsy unstable these
steps and here
we are
Mother
walking away me
staring out windows
mandevilla blooms
cascading down
the trellis like flames
hummingbirds midair
tiny beaks and tongues
so eager to drink as I
go on alone teaching
myself to breathe
Wind Shear
Together we lug salt
blocks to the backwoods
our tomatoes wire caged
beside the window a gift
to your mother bedridden
the final stage we planted
tomatoes now ruddy as numb
fists quiver hot against
the ground half-eaten
oozing that doe for sure
not a mile off yet
shit son all this work
for what we can’t keep
her at bay just scattering
corn and blocks out here
Girl’s hungry for
a body skin sun-
set like a dirt dauber’s brain
the matter because
the body is memory
it’s flame even without
a head it moves
We watch the news
blue light water in the pan-
handle another system
a mother even in weakening
the strongest inland eyewall
quiver hot landfall miles off
yet can’t keep her at bay
the gulf a code neural
as much as tropic
between the trees we cannot see
we see
Her eyes more
glowing green rapture
those tomatoes ahead
breath loops from her snout
you smoke I touch the bite
into pulp tomorrow we
could all be brain half-eaten
suns all be remnant
heaps of salt
Before bed before
your mother sleeps tumor
we cannot see the matter
will it to dissipate gone
and done it now
we wire we cage
you touch security another
system glowing blue
shit son hot mechanism
another code more light water
on your eye wall the only
voice a truth a lie scattering out
here:
armed
stay
Crossing the River
It is winter when your mother dies.
I want to tell you there are no gates
to heaven, that death is a coldwater
creek we waded in early spring.
How to pull you from her graveside,
make you see again the goldenrod,
the bluebells risen on the clay banks
of Halawakee?
*
All my life I’ve sung
hymns about Glory, a place yonder
we’ll someday wander into.
Hard to imagine anywhere
but our camp at Bartlett’s Ferry,
lying with you on a trail of creeping myrtle,
that invasive vine spread beneath us,
let me, let me falling warm-lipped
against my ear:
we felt, those mornings,
the swift, icy drift of the river.
*
I want to hold you there at sunrise,
in the deepest part of the water,
tell you she’s sprung from a long-held breath,
wandered drenched and new
to the other side and through
the woods, by and by to stand
in a meadow where she’ll find her faith
made sight: two cardinals, red and brown
at her feet, unstartled in the tall grass,
their orange beaks lifted, opened for seeds.