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The Cousin’s Secret
by Lindsay Wilson

June 30, 2021 Contributed By: Lindsay Wilson

This poem was nominated for The Best of the Net and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize.

Water
Image by Martin Str from Pixabay

 

When her eldest son died, her youngest

and I placed two fighting beta fish

into the small pond by the front door.

 

You need to understand how much they were promised.

 

We watched our faces on the mirror below us,

then he said, The secret’s

 

that I found a second full syringe beside his body.

 

Can you knot a promise to that knowing

 

                                                        someone left him to die,

 

so it will sink inside of you and never float back up?

 

In the backyard, we pulled green oranges from the limbs

to throw against the cinderblock wall until our palms

stuck to our skin,

                         But what about those fish?

you ask.

          They boiled in the Phoenix heat before

surprising my aunt with color against slime.

 

You see many years would go by before I watched her die

and then drove away, and back then I could still look myself

 

in the eyes—no ducking away from mirrors,

 

no avoiding bodies of water in sunlight,

and I did not know how much we take with us

 

when we die. That night the birds sat throat latched

with silence in the citrus leaves

                            as we swam in the blue pool,

 

taking turns underwater,

trying to hear each other scream.


LINDSAY WILSON is an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College where he edits The Meadow. He received a Silver Pen from the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame, and his poetry has appeared in The Colorado Review, Verse Daily, and The Carolina Quarterly. His most recent chapbook, Because the Dirt Here is Poor, is available from Main Street Rag.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Poetry Posted On: June 30, 2021

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