Origin Story
Whitney’s mother
didn’t watch us good
I knew this to be true
the day we saw the baby
gator in the canal
Kicking feet beneath
our inner tubes stilled,
we watched and drifted
as the lizard razored the water
We had been told
there should be a parent
coming along any minute, which
could sink one or both of us
to the river’s soft floor
and hold us there tightly
until we drowned
and that knowledge
was like a dare.
With the Sandhill Cranes
In outlet stores that smell haunted
by ghost tins of popcorn;
In sheets of rain that follow me down,
until I shelter in place,
a squall arriving in an inlet;
In a paper atlas my grandmother produces
for a rabbit-toothed cousin
with a geography project,
several natty pages in
a creased Soviet Union,
and no one says out loud
how some things here
have become useless—
for instance, the console tv
upon which sits another tv,
the space-age satellite dish,
dead-eyed on a stalk in the yard;
In the sprawl we wind in the truck,
braking for cranes in the road,
their beaks and legs clothes-hanging
the frocks of their bodies,
the cautious steps of old nomads,
pluckers of snakes from hot pavement,
on their way to the uncaged pool deck,
that past-swamp/future-swamp;
When I say I am never coming back here,
to this hopeless, shiftless,
this unfinished thought of a place,
I don’t mean it, because look
at the sugar sand, the squat palmetto,
the amber sinkhole where the kids swim
in shirts and shorts,
floating like sweet tea bags.
Shannon Finck earned her M.F.A. from Georgia College and her Ph.D. from Georgia State
University. She teaches writing at the University of West Georgia. Her critical and creative
work have appeared in such journals as Angelaki, Miranda, ASAP/J, Lammergeier, and
FUGUE. She is Poetry Editor of the independent literary journal, Birdcoat Quarterly, formerly
Muse/A. Originally and undeniably from the part of Florida with the most sulfuric smelling
tap water, she has made it no farther away than Atlanta, GA, where she currently lives with
an old dog and a young one.
