Thrush Poetry Journal
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Catherine Owen 

What they call this
 
Man fragile with chemicals
I miss you on this effervescent day, hot October slowing over the river where the small,
Slate boats yank salmon nets whose
Dark beads draw birds & one female eagle in the opposite cottonwoods cries a sound
I interpret as loneliness –
 
That’s what I have become – translator of the world’s grief, sifter of your dopamine
Sorrow – four years & still, I wept in the shower
This morning, raging out your absence, recalling your silly, wet-slick happiness as we soaped
Each other to an instant’s glossy reversal –
 
Everything you were now ash, memory, my mind can’t depart – they call this difficult mourning –
Those specialists in loss –
If I could have juggled your serotonin descents, recalibrated those tiny, violent receptors –
There is always this pointless set
Of questions – the water extending its silver moment, withdrawing it. 




Phantomnul
 
The liquid tin light of early morning is already a soft corrosion by nine & the ghosts
 
Are breaking open on the river.
 
You capstan.  You gunwhale.
 
You that green wound clicked off at dawn.
 
I used to see their bodies as cartoon or part of the ungreat chain of despoilers
 
Yet now they are solid little spectres of a dwindling narrative
 
Tire-haloed bows & a hull of salt, yanking the tired barges across inlets, estuaries, arterial passages
 
Empty or pale with cremains, dieseling their engines of the afterlife
 
Beneath the black 19th century dream.
 
You funnel. You Bollard pull.
 
You pushboat of the ephemeral end. 




Catherine Owen has published 13 collections of poetry and prose. Her most recent book of poems is Dear Ghost, (Buckrider Books, 2017) and the upcoming compilation of memoirs she is editing is called Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020).




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