The moon, maybe, was trying to tell us
what happens to girls who go down
by the river at night, trying to throw light
on each small disturbance of the water
as though each wavelet were a girl
coming up for the third
and last time: pretty Polly, little Omie,
the girls we were at thirteen
and seventeen and twenty-three
—Only say that you’ll be mine …
The Kanawha crawling
with coal barges, each with a carbide
trained on the black surface
of the water, mechanical
monsters patrolling a deep
we couldn’t gauge.
It wanted us, that river.
We sat back from the edge
and we told. We said it all
out loud—the lying, the pushing,
the watching while we drowned.
We tossed it all out
like breadcrumbs onto the water
and watched the barges push it under again
and again. Watched, like praying, for
small circles to pock the smooth center
path of their wakes, starveling fish
—or girls
rising, and trying, trying
to break the black waters and live.