By Tara K. Shepersky

“Things take the time they take.”
-Mary Oliver

Looking for myself again
and also trying to lose her

when gray began ungathering toward morning
I anchored my body to beach beside the river.

Sand began to clothe and enclose me
in fine gray silt until I was built

and then unmake and expose me grain by grain
this diffuse brain shaping in water and wind.

Thinking in hours I cannot know the time
it took to create and then erode an entire human.

In ants escorted off the shifting premises
–twenty-seven.

Epigraph from “Don’t Worry,” in Felicity

Copyright 2020 Shepersky