Alyssa Jewell

The River Grand

We were all there: beloved in the current. Patchwork of flames burning
off the pollution. Mire. Fast-moving. In the river’s shallows,

downhill from the interstate, I felt, in my blurry gaze, watery
just below the surface and unable to drown out my own heat.

When I looked to the other fires pitting themselves brightly
against that west-moving horizon, I saw how quickly

the darkness lit up with a dirtied hope and me in my own pyre
illuminating a falseness sprung of my personal choosing. My home.

My worried future. I decided to love in this city—to let it meld me
to its beams and glass so I could never leave a greening peninsula

that spoke to me about growth—how to do it, how to fit into it naturally
when no one would speak to me about my outer body always burning

as quickly as my mind from a gasoline heart leaning into the waxy shine
of knee-high cornstalks daily glinting into the passers-by near Exit 55.

There, now a decade ago, my teacher’s aide, newly adopted from India, lost
his young life one Independence Day. A semi barreled into his body that paused

along the road where the gravel meets the grass—his stillness before
those reckless seconds not unlike the way he would take to the corner

of our classroom, alone, to look toward the sky. He bowed over his lunch
to breathe in its steam with a ravenous patience as if calling down light

to hover over us, the steel chairs, the static carpet, that school along
the lakeshore ruined years after we both left it, bulldozed to the ground.

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Alyssa Jewell lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where she teaches ESL and creative writing classes. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Witness, Denver Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Washington Square and Poet Lore, among other publications. She is co-editor of poetry for Waxwing, as well as, Third Coast and coordinates the Poets in Print reading series in Kalamazoo, Michigan.