Moonrise – a poem by Kyle Laws

Moonrise
—after a photograph by Barbara Jabaily

Below the dam, the moon skips stones across
not a pond, but a reservoir where time is buried
along with the tops of cottonwoods to tangle
if you dive overboard.

Buried in layers of limestone that crumble
as you scale the top of a ridge is another sea
as I am of another sea where I gathered glass
rounded by the rush of waves

and the tumult of a river wanting to be let go
as I wiggled out of my mother’s arms
as soon as I could toddle across the sand
feet wobbling back and forth, side to side.

How I always craved an uneven surface thinking
I could walk to the set of a red sun on the bay
but here West, I put my foot into the reflection
across a lake as if now the moon is mine too.

Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.