The Delta
I speed down I-40, hazy with heat,
pocked by seared gullies,
pass raptors perched on power lines
far from Baltimore’s sirens
and wee hour whimpering
of the snubbed spaniel upstairs,
next door couple grunting
like my ex rutting
the lover he left me for,
their groans cresting
while I lie in the dark,
hands over my ears,
burning to bolt for the last cliffs
of the furthest coast, for the silence
of a pathless peak or deep canyon floor
as I blaze through this sun-flayed
flatland, car window lowered
hoping for westerlies scented with creosote,
rare duet of rain on rock,
heading for the border
where the Colorado is supposed to pool,
imagining a mayhem of marsh wrens,
but reach the delta,
dried and dead
of sound,
save for a yowling
dog, zippered voice of a desert fly
on a breeze of benzene.
*
Stalking Maryland’s fugitive zebra,
I park on some cul-de-sac,
strain to listen,
head craning out the car window,
waiting
far too long
for a nicker, a snort,
a glimpse of a striped hide
hidden in the suburb,
black/white bands of a runaway
from a livestock auction in Tennessee, escaped
as the bidding began like a breakaway
stallion that throws his jockey,
jumps the fence, bolts away,
leaving the rider splayed in dirt,
betrayed by one he knew so well,
gaping after the disappeared beast
like a stray sniffing for a phantom
scent, wishing the dull air would swell
with the sound of hooves,
a thrown over longing for a lover’s return,
I keep waiting
for a wild African horse to gallop
through a subdivision, wondering
if I am in the right spot
on the right day,
if I hear huffing
on a puff of wind,
hoofbeats
above the hiss
of insects in the grass.
*
Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.
