1 Mississippi 2

The long body of the water fills its hollows. A still 
river is always a lie, a one Mississippi is always
a lie that river is one million things and none
of those intend to please you. Oh river, Mother, 
Goddess, artery of a continent, they pretended 
you were a canal and you crushed them. 

But what if, burning fuels, they’ve won,
starved you, dried you up, oh marathoning miles rank
with boats and men you’ve murdered yet their
carcasses not enough to scare these humans, terrify
them into action, or into ceasing to action, or into
even noticing. Goddamn them. “The Mississippi River
is always just to my west” I wrote once when I was young
and thought I mattered, when cartoons taught that ditty
to spell you out, when we measured waiting to
seek hiders with an incantation of you. You, great river—

I love you, a flowing testament to how my loving 
or not affects nothing. I’ve always left too soon
to get the real loving done and now I live by a river
I do not love whose name I cannot spell much
less measure my life along haunted by clickbait headlines
of you dried up, gone.

Not much this era is unimaginable but still one
always gasps when lungs are forced to believe
stories the brain reruns in place of sleep. Yes, the bees and birds
will drop, yes, the oceans rise, yes, Superior, fresh
water sea, will drop and drain and we’ll all
drive up to see, each in our burning small coffin, to pose at
posing sad on what was once a beach or shore, no hiding now

from any desolated plain of truth, no hiding at all
without your name to count us home.

                               _____________________________________________

Elliott batTzedek is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet/translator. Her work appears in: American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Lilith, The Broadkill Review, Hole in the Head Review, Naugatuck River Review, Wordpeace, and Hunger Mountain Review. Her chapbook the enkindled coal of my tongue was published in 2017 by Wicked Banshee Press. A chapbook of translations from the Israeli lesbian poet Shez, A Necklace of White Pearls, was published by Moonstone in July 2024.