Bahiyyah Watson and Carolyn Miller
A Body of water
is always
infinite until it
is named and don't you
forget now that
what your
conscience tells
you is
generally true
this body
is water
here not ocean
there a sea today
and don't you
forget now that
the lesson to learn is
only when
you give love
you give love
and
no there
isn't more to it
than that
or
it isn't actually
love
Bahiyyah Watson
Bahiyyah Watson honed her craft as
poet and spoken word artist in New York and is recently resettled in San Francisco.
What to Remember
by Carolyn Miller
How the blue arcs over us
by day; how night reveals
the long, looping spiral dance
of the universe.
How October brings
not just the slanting sun,
but the rare low blue fog,
drawn like tissue across the islands
in the bay.
How at night
light and the sounds of people
laughing, talking,
spill out of restaurants
onto the streets. How
the city hums and moans
around us,
the cared for
and the lost, the boy
prostitutes on Polk Street,
the men pushing everything they own
in shopping carts, the dead
gray surfaces of houses in
the Mission. How clouds
move through the bending blue:
stratus, cirrus, cumulus, nimbus,
buttermilk, clabber—and the low
rushing night clouds,
broken particles of fog,
race along with us,
part of our yearning and
our moments of
sudden joy. How meanwhile the trees
everywhere transpire,
connecting earth and sky;
and birds rise up into
rivers and whorls
of air, as below them
in the soil the bright sexual
bodies of flowers
are opening.
How, though nothing ever is
quite what we imagined,
how much we are given,
how the earth both clings to us
and holds us up.
Carolyn Miller’s publishing credits include The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Sewanee Review,
and Shenandoah. Awards include the Boatright III Award for Poetry, from Shenandoah, and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3. A collection of peoms, After Cocteau, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2002
