The 2River View
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Shireen Madon

Think: Species

Tell me: Anything could begin. The way the wood
thrush sees herself in a pool

of tar beside the lake, and she, like a pool of ink,
sits dark and upright to watch

the sky sink: shallow, polluted bowl beneath
our feet. We grow upward

from this place, the bottom of the lake, and find
our fingers filters,

believe ourselves capable of knowing how to
find a place of air. Believe variable,

believe the plastic covering the top of the water,
believe it's what to expect.

You Are Everything But Alive

I've watched you for days, and your small thirst,
but the water can no longer hold you or your iron

wing that is a room no longer a room, or a fragment
of bayou where water moves quickly. What is the name

of this tree that melted to a red stone that asked us
Where are the others who used to live in the water? We have no

answer other than to say, take in the sight of sun
as though it's the last one. I close my mouth to stay

alive, to watch you become the same hard substance,
buried in kelp, then desert, then glacier, then this, again.

Shireen Madon has poems appearing in DIAGRAM, Fawlt Magazine, and Western Humanities Review. In June 2010, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Artists' Enclave at I-Park. contact

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