Flood Watch
Kathryn Merwin The fact of the highway cuts your silhouette in the black ash of my cigarette – it’s some time in December, the late shift, so many pine trees, a city made of mist. I untie my bootlace and shape your mouth into the stars – the golden wink of your crooked teeth fills the softest hour of night. Our astral tongues speak star-language – ghost stories of a silver river in Georgetown, fingers of fog splayed on glass. I think you could have been a constellation – angular, cold, one that hangs above the Blue Ridge, like holes in the ceiling that let in such little light, a tessellation of so many exit wounds. |
|

About the Author: Kathryn Merwin is a native of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Natural Bridge, So to Speak, and Sugar House Review, among others. She has been awarded the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize for Poetry, the Blue Earth Review Annual Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently pursuing her MFA through Western Washington University.