Backwater Rising – Michele Battiste
Backwater rising, baby, come on.
There’s panic in the landscape.
What one glitch in hindsight reveals,
what one broadcast made us
believe, come on. Gather
the fractures of your self can’t be
recovered though you
stutter, frozen there. The aperture
like a wound, your split
lip messy with fluid
and nothing will be perceived
undamaged again.
Each movement threatens
a gap to let the water
- How stupid we were
to feel safe. We blink
the incremental
rising, risks dismissed
as minute, pieced together
like this. What mistaken faith holds
the landscape—I see now—lashed
together, the water
rising, your lashes the first
chaos. Leave it, baby, we cannot
be again the whole of it going
under, come on.
Michele Battiste is the author of Uprising and Ink for an Odd Cartography, both from Black Lawrence Press, and five chapbooks, including Left: Letters to Strangers (Grey Book). She lives and works in Colorado.