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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

American Life in Poetry: ‘River’ by Ginger Murchison

By Ted Kooser U.S. poet laureate, 2004-06

Here’s a fine poem about the fleshy pleasures of adolescence by Ginger Murchison, from her book a “scrap of linen, a bone” from Press 53. Murchison lives in Florida.

River

Late afternoons, we’d tuck up our hems

under Minisa Bridge, scrape our white knees

on scrub brush and drowned trees to slide

down the dirt bank past milk-weed

gone to seed, cattails and trash to sit on stones

at the edge of the river and giggle and smoke,

waiting to wolf-whistle North High’s rowing team.

In the shadows where the milk-chocolate river

unfolded, ooze between our toes, we’d strip,

risk long-legged insects, leeches and mothers

for the silt slick on our thighs, the air thick

with the smell of honeysuckle, mud—the rest

of the day somewhere downstream. We didn’t

know why, but none of us wanted

to go home to polite kitchens and mothers

patiently waiting for what happened next,

the way women have always waited for hunter husbands,

kept vigils and prayed at the entrance of mines.

Poem copyright 2016 by Ginger Murchison from “scrap of linen, a bone,” (Press 53, 2016). and reprinted by permission of the author. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.