In exile

We swam in the lake almost daily–
baptism was something we had yet to question.
As far as we were concerned, ritualistic submersion
functioned the same no matter what was in your heart.
Weaned on thunderstorms and harsh winters,
the chill of spring-fed blue blessed us in our ignorance.
In the glacial troughs we floated untethered.
Steelhead passed below us, tracing the sand;
there was so much we didn’t understand.
About each other, about this place. We lived
upon the strata of context no one passed down to us;
the sedimentary layers, still open to interpretation.
We loved each other in the present tense.
We rarely stopped to wonder where the water
had come from. Elsewhere, vapor is pulled
up and westward from inland crops
before returning to earth. As rain, it seeps
through roads and land in some contaminated march
towards a body to bless fish in flame retardants.
What is the meaning of forever in a body that dies?
Many of the lake-fish were spawned in far-off
cement pits where they don’t know the meaning of prey.
Most of the fish weren’t safe to eat. We ate them anyway:
the smell of lake was thick as we chewed.
Glints of afternoon sun passed between our eyes
like a thousand vibrating roe, orange and promising more.

Brooke is a graduate student of environmental geochemistry living in Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry has been published in Tiger Moth Review, Deep Overstock, Willows Wept Review, and elsewhere. She works alongside the faithful devotion of her ginger cat and the ardent avoidance of her black cat.