Knotted Limbs, Tenderized Meat, & On The Possibility of Water

Knotted Limbs

It was in the rain that we found each other:
not in the hollowed-out rays of the sun’s warmth,
nor in childhood’s fragile innocence.
Until then, it had been the suffocation
of storms. Feeble roots laid bare.
Still, the glutting rain threatened to
swallow you and I and make it impossible
to see. Your eyes, emeraldine, dancing
in depths untold. Here rested the
cool caves I’d meant to escape within.
And like a deprived and twisted plant—
not a vine but ivy rich and ready
to be lush, ready to be envied, we began
to unfurl beneath each other’s sun.

Tenderized Meat

The reeds are oil-slick between my fingers
so I imagine falling
into some salvaged ocean of salt
suffocating.
Let the men roast. I want to live where the sun tints days
the warm orange of sunsets and the water
rushes in between my toes, bringing them back
to feeling.

On The Possibility of Water

When it rained I would run outside and lay in mud
watch the stream overflow and ravage its banks
dream about buying a kayak and ending up in Louisiana.
Possibility was dreaming a stick you’d dropped into that rush of white
was finally reaching the ocean.
One day, in the center of the state
there was a dark cabin surrounded by tall grass
where my brother and I caught trout in waist-deep water.
The question of whether they were put there was
the question of whether generations had been wiped out
or had lived and were being touched by us, now.
No one put them there, I wished. Otherwise,
why play with what was already trapped?
When the bearded man lifted up rocks he showed my brother and I
how to learn what the fish were eating.
There were bugs beneath the rocks along those banks
so we matched man-made flies to what was beneath stones.
Stepping through cairns, finding colonies.
The sunlight striking a silver trout beneath you
as the stream bit what it could and promised numbness.

—Beau Coursen

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.