On Estuary #2, by Tadashi Sato

Oil on Canvas, Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa.
(rocks disrupt water)

I carry my rocks inside.
The way in, too quiet: an end, the lapping of water, a start.
A ghost story and a love story: same difference.
We like to say dead body but we never say live body.
My pressure points, repetitive, no heat; life has left this canvas:
water sputters, drowns us all, beckons the birds to visit.
Clouds leak from the summit.
I want to flee, seek out the color orange, a dry square room,
wrap this weighted blanket around someone else’s body,
so it won’t find me. I fail.
I am under the body. I sleep. I wake under the body,
I forget my temples, a gravy of detritus rapping to get in.
The gray water comes, not friend-like,
twigs, moss, water bugs, plastic, the sheer volume of it all
because: physics.
I have no natural environment.
I am a natural environment.
I am a body.
I am under a body.
I am the body that I am under.

Author’s note on this POSSESSION-themed poem:
Sometimes, no matter what we do, we cannot escape or get away from a feeling inside of us. The feeling possesses us. In this particular case, with this poem, the rocks represented grief to me. I've had several conversations with friends about carrying a sack of grief around with me, even while moving forward and experiencing joy, and living my life. The grief, about a relationship that ended, was always a weight I carried/carry. Next step: one friend said to create a dinner party and invite the grief to a seat at the table and have a conversation. So that is in my future!

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. Her fifth, full length poetry collection, “Pool Parties” is now available from Unsolicited Press. She is the author of fifteen poetry chapbooks. Some of her work appears in The Pinch, South Broadway Press, Cleaver, Zone 3, Slant, Yalobusha Review, and Grist. Find her online at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.