NOVEMBER
I wish I was a Great Blue Heron
standing on one leg in the Clark Fork River
clutching ancient bedrock
in my talons for balance
instead of your waist
to hold you upright
so the cancer that stole
your steadiness
won’t pull you to
the floor while you
brush your hair.
*
Raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Elizabeth Conway has her MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula. Her fiction has been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction contest, Reed Magazine’s John Steinbeck Award and The Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. You can also find her work in the ‘Weird Sisters’ Lilac City Fairy Tales anthology by Scabland Books, New Flash Fiction Review, Blue Earth Review, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. Her chapter “A Fire at Valleyview Nursing Home” recently won Uncharted Magazine’s Novel Excerpt Contest, judged by Cynthia Pelayo. In addition, Conway is a recipient of the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship.
What a beautiful poem. The simile pulls two ways: toward the beauty of the heron and toward the pathos of the illness.
Lovely and evocative.
Beautiful and aching.