Maja Lukic
The River
I didn’t want to go into the river
but followed my friends descending
through the bamboo, sliding
into the water like odd stones.
I felt the plunging soft belly
of sand and silt under my feet.
I’d never bathed like this: cold
and communal, in water both soft
and murky in that way thoughts are.
My breasts were ice, and my head
felt rinsed under the moon,
as if all water had seeped from it.
All thoughts.
It was my father who taught me
to swim when I couldn’t even speak,
to trust the water and my own
provisional body in it.
A month before he died
of a shattered skull,
I dreamed I was in brain surgery.
I could feel every cold tool
scraping against tissue, prodding
my thoughts, splicing images.
It had been a strange spring—
summer flashed in like a warning—
and then he was gone.
It’s not that signs don’t come to us—
it’s that I’m never still enough
to use them. When I climbed
over the rocks and out of the water,
the bamboo forest glowed,
like halogen bulbs blazing toward
a permanent, black sky.
I walked naked and wet, feeling,
more than knowing, my way back.
Maja Lukic reads “The River” recorded by Reed Turchi at Second Take Sound
Maja Lukic’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, the Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn where she serves on the Board of Four Way Books and as curator of Four Way’s Translator’s Page.