The 2River View 18.4 (Summer 2014)
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Bradley J. Fest

One Summer Near Niagara

Thrown in the way of that never forgotten nunnery,
the wife in her cooking apron came out to taste
the needles when the rains came that year,
and she only remembered twisting her arms through the blender
while martini mistaken water wound down the steps.

So cold was the thought of the languid mop to wash
the blood up; tiny sea anemones waded their way
into the backbone of the turkey breast.

Blue trellises in the wake of this wayward household
held so gently vines air-brushed a signifying gray;
those little roods let the conversion of earth
snake up them toward the rafters, toward the rain ducts.

So much liquid washed through that apron one summer,
a river, Lethe, could have passed unnoticed
in that night impregnated with steam and soiled blue jeans.
Finally, her first born would come over the ridge,
comprehending all the contents of his living room in a glance. 

The mop felt akin to the trellis that summer,
their wood clutched so tightly in the palm of something new
to be added to the spinning globe.

Bradley J. Fest is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. His poems have appeared in various journals, and his essays have been published in boundary 2, The Silence of Fallout, and elsewhere. He blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax.

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