feeder dam #8, aqueduct #2, haunted house bend
Natalye Childress

where river meets state, throw up a prison, and name it after a branch of water, like maybe if you
waterboard them with muck of the potomac, they’ll become trinitarians, confess to their sins, change
course the way this serpentine river flows. or, insert lime dosers to stop the slag buildup in these
streams that are more lemon juice than holy water, to purify the water. then make the men drink the
water, to purify the men. the nation’s river has seen more blood than the cellblock walls, but we insist
on building inverted fortresses to contain the men we deem worthy of containing. when night falls, the
headless man in the paw paw whispers, his words carried along on a new moon by the monocacy after
dark. the long-departed soldiers whose drowned bodies, swollen with bloat, floated downstream in
defeat, in a tree line, haunt us. and the robber, or his ghost, hand heavy and shadowed with lantern,
leads the way to buried treasure, and by buried treasure i mean the unmoored boats, the intersex fish,
the eutrophication of the slackwaters. i’m standing on the towpath and i’m passed by a horse
sometimes, a dog sometimes, once a cat, once a raccoon, but mostly the mules. they make the mules
drag the logs, they tie them up, whoop “ye-yip-ye,” make them swim, make them drown. all to appease
anacreon in heaven. oh say can you see the death of, the death of, the death of. our boats are bringing
you hidden sacks of salt, a black bear, pianos, watermelon, and oakum to seal the gaps. bushels of
oysters to cater your party, and green cornstalks to smoke out your enemies. standing in the tidewater,
paths form by sandstone, schists, slates, and on and on it goes, westward through the narrows. i can
swim to georgetown from here. i can walk to west virginia from here.