Jamie Samdahl |
Back to Issue 9 |
I.
Trout lilies. That’s how you know the time of year. Down by the river, stomachache. Pain as pollutant. You saw it kill your father. Your father, so much smaller than a river. II. As a child you imagined yourself a true animal. You dug for onions, you dug for grubs. Swallowed whole summers in your father’s garden. III. Runoff from the mills turned the water the most beautiful blue. You splashed and you drank. The dye stained your skin. Daddy, you told him, I wish I had been born blue. That made him laugh. IV. There was time spent in the hospital after that. A few weeks. There was so much blue to get out of you. Yellow pills and one red pill. No blue pills. V. Every night the nurse whispered to you, you’re going to die. She had you convinced. Every morning you vomited from the sheer surprise of being alive. It was trout lilies. It was the third week of April. A Surprise Visitunbearable happiness
the spring thaw sap dripping from the taps the loudness of syrup boiling kitchen steamy sweet lightheaded gasps for air unbearable sweet the first jar I saved the first jar I walked down the road like one of the three wise men—I thought-- intent on delivering such a gift * I missed my father not by much the coals still hot in his woodstove |
Jamie Samdahl is a poet and naturalist from Princeton, Massachusetts. She has been published in Washington Square Review, Mandala Journal, Mountain Record: The Zen Practitioner’s Journal, Canopic Jar, and elsewhere. In the spring of 2013, she was named winner of the 90th Annual Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Prize.
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