#lyricalprose

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Gone was any trace of you

I think I am finally clean

The Long Memory of Water

They always come back to me. Even when they pretend to forget, they come back.

Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they scream. Sometimes they don’t make a sound at all.

But I hear them.

I have no mouth, no tongue, no hands to pray with.

Only current. Only flow. Only the long memory of water.

I remember the first boy who bled into me. His blood was thin and sweet.  It didn’t stay red for long, the river never lets a color stay what it started as.

I remember the girl who dropped her shoes,  walked barefoot into me, said she needed to feel something clean after what happened behind the laundromat.

I remember the songs they used to sing from the banks when the air was thick with cotton and grief, and the trees knew better than to ask questions.

The body of a Black man, tied to a cotton sack filled with stones. They said it was suicide. The sack said otherwise. He drifted in my arms for three days  before a child found him snagged beneath the cypress roots.

His mother came to my bank, wearing her church dress and a fury  she refused to speak aloud. She knelt in the mud. She did not cry. Just whispered, “I know you saw.” And I had.

I remember the children that summer, splashing through me just one week  before they were found in a ditch. I remember laugher,  and their voices.

One liked jazz. One liked baseball. The other wrote poems in the margins of his Bible.

They laughed in the shallows,  like the world would always let them.

Someone threw a bloodied shoe into me. Not because it belonged to them, but because guilt is heavier than leather.

I carried it anyway.

I remember the older gentleman, tied to a fence and beaten not far from my bend. The rain came days later, washing his blood washed into as if the sky itself refused to let it dry.

A girl from town dropped in a rosary. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there in the storm, fists clenched so tightly,  I thought she’d split her palms open.

I took the rosary. Let it float. It still glints under moonlight,  if you know where to look.

And I remember the bridge.

How it groaned under the weight of hope and bodies. How feet thudded like heartbeats. How the tear gas floated down softly,  like clouds that had forgotten how to be gentle.

They came rushing into me that day, some crawling, some stumbling, some carrying others who could no longer carry themselves.

They didn’t ask me to save them.

They asked me to hold  what they no longer could.

And so I did.

I held shoes. Bibles. Gloves. Teeth.

A paper flag that refused to sink, no matter how deeply I pulled. 

A yellow scarf snagged on a limb, just below the surface,  fluttering gently, like something remembering who it belonged to.

But I remember clearly. 

I remember them all.  The singers and the silent,  the drowned and the delivered,  the ones who jumped  and the ones who were thrown.

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