Kyle Laws

Ship That Never Returned

Because of a weakness for water
I stand at the bulkhead every night
and gaze out onto the expanse
that may be the sea with long tides

or may be rippled sandbars that stretch
from where they begin to where they end                 
at the hull of the ship Atlantus
that barely peaks over waves that lap her side

and spill into the circle of draught behind
where men once shouted one to the other
in need of a preserver to be brought back on board
as the bottom bumped sand at the dock

and there was a song that echoed
around the nest at the top of the mast
where gulls had their way in wind
and could be heard all the way to Cape May.

 

I walk between railcars parked on tracks. Not a single run
of trains heads out of the station. I hear a rumble and see a
roar of water coming at me. I scramble to the top of a railcar.   

Never has it been this quiet.
Never so deserted.
Everyone has left the station
and I’m walking in a graveyard.
Not a single headstone anywhere.

The river comes in one story high.
All the rafters gone.
All the plaster and lath.
What’s heading toward me is energy.
Unleashed, unwrapped, bare boned.

Legs sway as I climb
in a gust I’ve never felt before.
Legs loose from my hips
unmoored in a rush downriver
where the crows call.  

Not a sound except the wind
circling buildings in a game of tag
where no one is touched
jostled, nothing to grab 
but other train cars drifting by.   

 

Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she has a studio-gallery and directs the Pueblo Poetry Project. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021), Uncorseted (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With nine nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.