What about the river? It will be there
and it will be there and he will pull from it
and unbend himself like a sunflower
and there will be a fish on him. A cow
bloated black with gasses
and decay, tail sticking up grey like a flag will float by.
The middle of the current will grow on it. Where will the
river be? It will not see him and he will take
the fish away and the cow will float with the logs
or churn with the riverweed and schooling catfish
gnawing at the mud like beavers. And the beavers
will gnaw too; and the river will be silent and he will
bathe the fish in the tub despite the poison.
A barge will break waves with stolen iron, moonshine rock
slip down the waterhighway like a drained tub.
What will be downriver?
He will get closer to the cow.
It will have died over a week before.
It will be the only scent he will remember.
River currents will shove and inflate it
down to the dam. The gasses will bubble
like a gurgle as it plies the shipping lane
of barges. The black hair will be replaced.
Though he will try to look away the balloon will
be replaced, replaced by sandbars,
and they will rise with silt and pebbles,
and there will be roots of ownership
stretching from Kentucky and Ohio
under the river. And the river will seem
very insignificant and for a moment a lie
he will tell to the cow about unbending men
who disbelieve the EPA and come to steal fish anyway.
The cow will almost remind him of other cows.
Will Hollis is from Cincinnati, and a MFA candidate at Western Kentucky University. He’s an alumnus of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts (2006), a Creative Writing Assistant for GSA (2016), a Scholastic American Voices Recipient (2007), has been a reader for Steel Toe Books, and an editor of Lavender Bluegrass, LGBT Writers on the South (2015).
–Art by Ashley Holloway