At the river there once was a glacier, now there are seashells
I’m always talking to my mother over my shoulder
retracing steps along the riverbank
gray with last season’s dust washed
up on the bankside clovers and ivies.
Some days I hear sepia, green tea.
There it goes again says one of my mothers, the one
who shares a name with this
watershed. Any parent will tell you,
the unborn have a way of breaking
all your plans. Goose shit
turns out to be mud, banks of shale
wishing coins. Mama tells me I’m the reason
Ima broke her vegetarianism,
some unspeakable longing
for fatty acids, protein. She wanted salmon,
swimming up from the riprap dam, pink
and happy. 14,000 years ago,
continental glaciers rumbled away from this land,
beveling, scraping, eroding. I hear
the freeway past the woods, garbage
tossed from cracked windows; yearlings
startling each other,
bounding over the velvet soft surface. This year,
the scientific term for the rate at which the glaciers are melting is
“off the charts.”
Another way to put this is
sleepless, stumble. I push a little
shell into my ear
and remind my mother this death
is not inevitable. What I can’t stop
imagining are the gasses and microbial organisms
thawing out. My thin river looks like nothing
more than an ultrasound.
Pleistocene piranhas
shrugging off blankets of bone and shell
and I hear singing. They want me
to fall right through, how
humor is a trick of haunting: just when I think
I’ve caught the fish, it
bursts into light.
Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal (he/they) is a queer poet, climate justice organizer, and drag performer from Brooklyn. They completed an MFA in creative writing at The Ohio State University where they served as Managing Editor for The Journal. Their work can be found in Seventh Wave Magazine, Foglifter, and 14 Poems and has received support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. See what they’re up to at isaiahbackgaal.com
