PAULA TURCOTTE

Desire, at last, a remembered landscape
after Charles Wright

Houses choked with silt
               Mothers wiped wedding photos
with rubber-gloved thumbs
               Fathers ripped drywall
from basements, spilling
               across lawns once-green
now a sea of brown

               A fresh twenty-one, purpling with desire,
                              wrung my way out of girlhood at last

Handfuls of children darted
               between soaking mountains
of grade-school notebooks
               moth-eaten granny blankets
and jeans worn before geese
               flocked to higher ground

               If there’s anything from that summer I remember
                              it’s my body, suddenly a foreign landscape

And me, in maroon rain boots,
              wading through the life
that was my life, knee-deep searching
               not for what the flood took
but for who it left behind