Poem of the Day

 
 
 
Featured
Rising Water

by Rosa Sophia


We live at the edge of a flood plain, on the bank of a creek. In the evening my mother drinks,
falls asleep in the woods under the oak trees. It’s so hard to wake her, to get her home.

Summer rain falls. We leave the house and come back to find water.
The flood surrounds us. We park down the street and walk.

I am ten. At my grandmother’s house, I learn the creek can carry sound.
My grandmother says, I hear you kids and your mother all night, screaming at each other.

I’ve never seen anything like it: The flood lodges a car in the arms of a tree.
I try to imagine how this happened as my mother pours another glass of whiskey.

We walk in the woods and hear a rattlesnake before we see it, thick and coiled beneath a boulder.
My mother says it must’ve washed down from the mountains. It readies its venom.

My mother empties the glass. She picks the lock on the bathroom door with a kitchen knife.
She says she will kill herself. I decide my body can be a barrier between her and death.

The water rises. Red and blue lights flash. The cops knock on the door again.

We’re always so close to drowning.

______________________________________________________________________

Rosa Sophia’s poetry has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, Limp Wrist, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She holds a degree in automotive technology and is the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine.

NB: Click on the poem’s title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile device and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.

 

***NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The authors reserves all rights to license uses of their work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.