"(the way free will changes
underwater, the way the tongue
pushes skyward)"
from Erin Weeks's poem The River August

Between a Woman's Teeth
They cling to my clavicles like the memory of wood. My daughters are green-eyed chimeras, spinning shrouds while I sleep.

Give my body back. What do I call this horizontal energy where water and silence meet? On the riverbed-stones and snails, and shards of bone, the frightening traces of those before me. My mother's tiny wedding ring, her slim wrists. My grandmother's Irish melody. The truth of the river is that it stops for no one. What if this love is not by choice? The hair I brush is not my own but the gift of generations. A thousand dead men have touched the dips in my back, the scars on my legs. I am wafer-weight beauty, pride of the river. But the threat of dawn aches like a fever between my teeth. These bones have always knwon. At daybreak I will recede and my daughters will rise, greenest and most perfect floods of replacement."