Today I walk across a parking lot
thinking about water. If you live
in a town near a river you can stand
next to it while it repeats itself
endlessly, which is how a friend once
described his factory job to me.
Years ago a student sat in my office
and told me that she was injured
on the job, got her arm caught
in a machine, some contraption
that twisted it and tore it wide open
so that it could not be put back together.
Her grief rose up from deep waters,
the river below the river.
This will not be one of those working-class-
hero poems, one of those celebrate-
the-proletariat poems as I wrench
the shopping cart out
of its cage, try to free
it from the others as more
and more of them thunder over
the rough pavement on their way
to rejoin the pack. I recall her voice
travelling swiftly
like it could find its way
down any number of
paths, like it could
hop a train out of one lost
city and find a bigger, brighter one.
She looked at me as if I knew
the real forces of water,
all of its whorls
and eddies, the rise
of its depths.
Nancy Botkin’s chapbook The Honeycomb was the 2022 winner at Steel Toe Books. Her full-length collection, The Next Infinity, was published by Broadstone Books in 2019. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as december, Poetry East, Flying Island, The Indianapolis Review, and Eclipse. She is an editor at Wolfson Press and a retired Senior Lecturer at Indiana University South Bend.