Lauren Mallett

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Despite the letup in rain,
the swamps aren’t receding.

Is less land just how this goes?

For months the beach access road
has been impassable
except by the monster trucks
that cast out oil-slicked rainbows and stain
the puddle lands copper.

I’ve tried to get through them and given up
every week for a month.
I’ve worn my knee-high galoshes,
encouraged by the series of wood planks
left floating among the reeds and wax myrtle roots
like a buffet—come on,
all yours, here—and my step
sinks the wood to the far enough below shift of sand.

At close to sunk the ancestors threaten
You wanted a body now act like it.

So I let the polluted murk flood my boots.
I wade up to my waist in the winter’s worth of
proud boy rig exhaust. It feels like water.
I fear for my skin.
I rejoice at this sloshing.
Now I can say you bet I did—

the puddle’s less cold, the ground shallower,
I emerge from the other edge

unchanged and stinking,
my bottom half clinging to me by its wet seal.

How this goes is the whole world seeps in.
The sludge of their laughter like
moss on the bark of me.

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Lauren Mallett’s poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, The Seventh Wave, The Night Heron Barks and other journals. She lives on Clatsop land of Oregon’s north coast. www.laurenmallett.com.