For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile by Colleen S. Harris

For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile

             for Shara

I step slowly, taking rising water
inch by inch against my reluctant body.
It was always this way: you the river,

and the silt, and the weeds tangling
my ankles, me the supplicant, a sacrifice
of gooseflesh and good sense moving

through the murk toward drowning.
No matter how I entered the river,
I would have always gotten drenched.

If you were here, I would have still
stumbled my way through a field
of terrible lovers with your laugh

steering me past the worst of the regrets.
You might have turned me away from
the used car parts manager in Hixson,

sold me instead the false promise
of that beautiful blue-eyed Chattanooga
boy with no sense of self-preservation

and hands one firework shy of a full fist.
These waters are deep and still. I cannot
swim here where there are no waves,

this stagnant water tastes like copse
and corpse and waterlogged leaves and
the cigarette butts we threw behind us

back in 1998. I dive, and the deeper I go,
the better I can see who we nearly were:
Thursday nights, merlot-soaked, howling

on a Louisville balcony, making love
to our many ghosts, resurrecting old loves
only to drown them again, and again, laughing.

*

Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA from Spalding University and works as a university library dean. Author of four books and three chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback, 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010). Follow her writing via Bluesky (@warmaiden) and at https://colleensharris.com