The Apostrophe Blog
I am drawn to bodies of water, particularly rivers and streams. I love to walk along them and stare at their rapids and ripplings, cross them on bridges, and study the way they change through the seasons with rainfall, snowmelt, or drought. One of the longer versions of my preferred author bio attempts to spell out why—
Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a downtown creek in Ithaca, New York, then headed west to live near the Willamette River in Corvallis, Oregon until moving to a house near the mighty Columbia in Portland in 2007.
Not long after arriving in this city that boasts not one but two navigable rivers, my poem, “These Miles to My River,” was selected for publication in Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass, an anthology edited by Sharon Wood Wortman, Kirsten Rian, and Ed Wortman. This collection included poems about bridges—both real and imagined—written by 70 poets along with directions for five self-guided bridge explorations in and around the city of Portland.
This poem later appeared in my chapbook, The Hours of Us.
These Miles to My River
I set off in shoes that pinch,
sink heel-deep in the mud across levees
to worship at the street of Erato,
her bridge the span of a prayer.
Beyond this archipelago of anthracite,
the miles to my river drain shorelines,
turn oxbow-weighty, the trees on the bank
sing a chorus of umlauts and howls.
I was told there’s a furnace, one smithy’s forge
near the dock for the ferry where words,
heated then hammered, emerge perfect,
first violin in a string quartet.
If I chew this taffy long enough,
the flavor will rise, anise India ink,
and I can float my message downstream
on the back of a leaf in a bottle:
These miles to my river wear a tragedy
of donkeys, blinkered and chained
to an underground pen.
The public domain post card image above of the Susquehanna River was published between 1930 and 1945.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Publication News: “These Miles to My River” - December 1, 2024
- Piecework - November 30, 2024
- Publication News: Passager - November 27, 2024
