This selection, chosen by guest editor Nic Job, is from Portals by Laura Grace Weldon (Middle Creek Publishing 2021).
Riverbank Ceremony
Step out on mossy water’s-edge rock,
let the river’s rush take you
beyond yourself.
When you’re ready, kneel,
and select a secret
from the heavy chandelier
inside your chest.
Whisper it to the water.
She will carry it in her molecules
around the bend, out of sight.
Your secret will
steam from tea sipped in Vietnam,
slide down an antelope’s throat
and out again in its blood,
trickle from a glacier in Greenland,
hurl from cumulonimbus clouds
onto cobbled streets in Belgium,
trill through secret underground paths,
rise up a redwood’s trunk,
turn into a silver helix
twisting from your bathroom faucet,
translucent, transformed
washing over you.
Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. She is the author of three poetry collections—Portals (Middle Creek, 2021), Blackbird (Grayson Books, 2019) and Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013) as well as a handbook of alternative education titled Free Range Learning (Hohm Press, 2010). Her background includes teaching nonviolence, leading abuse survivor support groups, and writing collaborative poetry with nursing home residents.
Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.
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