Let’s say there wasn’t any other way
let’s say my sisters stood by the river and waved
hello and goodbye it was all the same
but sometimes it dropped its leaves and
we just waited sometimes it pointed
every direction at once without going
and the moment had only its way with me
a gang of them made up one
and it knew something I didn’t
but it didn’t understand each other I
admit I wanted to know them
and I didn’t want it to leave me alone
my stories come back marked not at this address or moved and owes me money or try another riverbank or no one even vaguely resembling this has ever lived here and the wind’s hot hand begins reaching beneath the earth’s freshly woven clothing after a season of distance and cool brushing
domestic geese nervous about the sunshine after so much gray shake it off like the dust of an old attic while the turtles shuffle onto the bobbing driftwood climbing over each other to let light dry them their little bundled piles of white turd drying to paper and dreaming wondering what they can’t remember
I had to wait for something outside to come in
after something inside had gone out
the distance was greater than before
the breadcrumb trail my thoughts had been
picked up and swallowed by a crow
happy with himself and the unexpected way the world provides
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review. In 2011 he is again a finalist in poetry at Mississippi Review. The Spring 2011 Bitter Oleander contains a feature including an interview and 18 of his hybrid works.