It’s filtering down across our state line
now that the storm has passed—the kind of water
we’d like to think was born of the river,
but it’s not. It only arrives after drowning
swine in their slaughterhouses. This water’s black,
death-steeped, brackish. My neighbor’s sons
float across the road, basking in the sun-
warmed water, belly-crawling ’cross the line
halving the street. I warn of worms wading over black-
top. Good as poison. They wallow in this water
that tastes of decay and is day by day drowning
the houses that lie low to the earth. The river
feeds and swells till it isn’t just the river,
it’s my home, and even under our scathing sun
I can’t parse the difference between drowning
and redeemed. Rising, inch by inch, the only line
that matters anymore is where there’s water
to recede and leave behind the rotted, bitter, black
of charred remains, like Nana’s ashes turning black,
sinking like loose tea leaves into the river.
Maybe it’s been her all along, a gator in the water
free to scratch against our crawlspace, sun-
shimmered, spiteful. Swimming under the line,
cloaked in dark scales, between alive and drowning.
She always said baptism’s as good as drowning
in this kind of place. This flood is her black
swan song. She smears our inheritance with a hard line
of rot across her living room walls for the river
to rise to. She came to me in a dream, her son
least loved, but I didn’t heed her warning that water
is the wage of sin. That in bearing life, water
is worshipped, matriarch of the drowning
masses. This is our purgatory beneath the sun’s
slow burn, shining over the ever-rising black
lapping against our ankles. Our river
can’t be escaped. I know which side of this line
we were destined for even as the waterline
crests. Everything I know is drowning in this river
and the sun can’t dry this sort of black.
—Madison Rahner
Madison Rahner is a novelist, biographer, and poet from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
