TO SKIP A STONE
MONICA RICO
Dear Lake Michigan,
I wasn’t always afraid
of you. Not in the traditional
sense, because when my mother
said I ought to be having fun,
I did; it was awfully hard
not to. She pulled me from
your shores to jump waves.
I didn’t think we’d die,
she wouldn’t let me.
Twice we came to you. My mother
called me a water bug and a lifetime.
Everywhere we went, I shook, asked
her to tell me how she met my father.
The story I memorized. A double
date and my father couldn’t keep his
eyes off her fuzzy hair. He called it
kinky, making her blush every time.
I am a tourist to you
counting the number
of chirps a cricket makes
to estimate your temperature.
Cold.
I have never seen you
in the winter, where you are
hidden, cavernous, and very
alive. To you I will walk,
listen for the whisper
of a bird wing, the crack
of snow beneath my boot,
one at a time like how I stop
breathing on a boat from
memory, and remind myself
I know how to swim.
My mother is watching
as always, listening for me
to growl as I did when
she left the room.
Tiny animal, she thought
and let me chew on bones.
All her songs are wrong
and unpredictable like your waves
yet I come back,
the wrong color and expectation.
Beside you as gently as my mother
set me in the canoe. I swear
it was hours, years, we floated,
and I touched you like a fish
in stillness. The stick of you
swollen in every pour and when I
slept your sand leaked from my feet.
No one can consume the sun
in one billowing curtain like you do.
Say goodbye, and let me roost
in the depth of you. Shipwrecked
to the sound of you all light
and wind rise.