When we emerged from the willow’s bridal-veiled curtain, we were no longer sisters. Doe at the lake’s edge startled away. Palmed a stone in my hand’s cup. As if to impress you one last time, I skipped it over the water’s glass surface, wanted you to watch the precise quick dimples, a hundred ringlets the wake its weight creates. Instead, you turned, stepped toe to ankle to knee into the water cold with morning. Then you swam out, far out, beyond the last of my stone’s skipping indents. I had thought you went to collect what I had thrown away. Your name from the force of my lungs did not sound right. The bob of your faraway head, nearly even with the surface. The faint halo as you descend.
Emily Rosko’s poetry collections include: Weather Inventions and Prop Rockery, both from the University of Akron Press, and Raw Goods Inventory from the University of Iowa Press. New poems have appeared recently in The Denver Quarterly, The Mississippi Review, and The Shore. She is Associate Professor at the College of Charleston and Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program. She is the Poetry Editor of Crazyhorse.
