“In My Best Dreams They Are On the Water” by Remica Bingham-Risher

In the quiet, on your own,
nothing can touch you.

You listen to rustling of leaves, the constant song of redbirds and jays,
the concert orchestrated beneath you.

Breathing at the surface, small things
unseen, create the ripples and circles, but let you be.

As you are patient and skillful, you’ve made a lure and cast it carefully,
a pretty fish—a shining, writhing wonder—will appear.

If it is willful, you’ll bear down and hold the line. Your arms, full of power,
used to carrying jars of lard, bags of flour, children, well and unwell,

even grown others, who must be lifted
into a bed, an afterlife.

The fish gather near the eddies, around fallen trees, a respite
from the weight of the water. In my dreams, you are still someone’s daughter,

she calls to you eventually. When you leave the river and enter
the house, the children are grateful you’ve arrived. They are alive

and will be well fed. You gut the fish, remove its scales.
Dip it in buttermilk and cornmeal, fry it in hot grease.

There is strawberry pie and cola. Every plate is full.
Ain’t no politician save you; ain’t no man make or break you.

You are here and every bounty.
I hope you rest. I’ll wait at the edge.

I’ll pray for low tide and abundance. When you come
you’ll show me how to let the stillness into my body, to grow into myself—

what to throw back into the everlasting,
when to lift my skirt and splash onto the shore,

when to mix salt with salt and sun with sun, when to become
another part of the earth, hungerless, a corridor.