Poem 24

For the Mississippi River

I.
Let’s call you thief. When I think of you rustling
through and packing up what you can, you make me
think of my easy surrenders. Terror gets in my bones
easy. I’m the bulb to the frost.

II.
Darling, you tell me south like a well-written love
letter so I think of what holding you would be like:
light as a screen door, violent as the slamming of one.

III.
I try to be more than your landscape of industry,
of barges. Life is hard for all living things and I guess
you’re just the end for some so I go with an open heart

to your broken cities, have built new chambers
in my chest, am cultivating gardens there.

IV.
Since your most recent escape, my decision-making comes
in the form of a blackout stampede like your loose heart.
I take and abandon easily, have learned to regret
nothing, have taken you as my wild mother.

V.
In my poorly constructed letters
I sign under love, yours, always.

-marlo barrera, completed march 2010



*With 2 lines that I think I stole from Bennet Bergman