RUNNER UP How to Read Whitewater in the Mid-Atlantic Region Poem by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews
Here’s the gift, the undetermined, toothy space in which it bubbles up crazily, thrashing around and telling you incessantly about the nature of possibility: these terrible courtships, in other words, you’ve had with rivers, their greenish syntax letting all the silk slip to the floor. Susquehanna, Lehigh, Youghigheny, their stolen clauses, the low trees trailing their fingers as if to say there now river, there now. And in the little canoe, you sound out each line in turn. This is the side of you that is full of eagles. The story unfolds in several keenly observed parts: eddies in their indecision. Standing waves like stacks of letters, each signed fondly. Undercut rocks against which the water boils low and smooth, dangerous in the same way that simplicity is dangerous— You read for answers because the painted ceiling above you demands a key to its own reflection. You read for the sluice because you are normal: you ask for directions, you are standard in that finally, you favor the tongue harbored between the wide-set molars, the sunlight bouncing off of a body shaped like allowance, like the valleys you dare to call your home.
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the 2018 Akron Prize for Poetry and forthcoming from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews.
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