On the Banks of the Wabash

by Matthew Thomas Bernell

I like the idea that, really, there is only one poem, and it is the song we all sing to ourselves, not as ourselves, necessarily, but as each other.

Don’t you remember the story, now? The one about the beautiful singer who strutted into a river, singing, and drowned? And it was you.

You were the singer and the river and everything else, too, even those moths that punctuated swampy darkness. But how did that one end? Tell me again.

Wasn’t it a while afterwards? Somewhere in the distances of evening, downstream? Beyond beams of search party lights, no mouth ever surfaced, but, please,

correct me if I am wrong, a voice, no, your voice, leapt from water, started soaring through a tangled canopy of sycamores, as if it had never, never could have, silenced.

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Matthew Thomas Bernell is an emerging writer from somewhere near the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Cream City Review, North American Review, The Pinch, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. Currently, he is working on a chapbook while pursuing his MFA through Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. You can find him on the site formerly known as Twitter @ImmanentFlux.