Maggie Millner 

Second Prize Winner, Greg Grummer Poetry Award

During the storm, the culverts
we crawl into are the size of silos.

The ropeswing is hanging
off the willow in the wind.

It rains like dropping apples
and the water, full of snappers, swells.

Under the road the boys
smear a dragonfly
across the rust.

The pond swallows the creek:

where I swam naked for the first time
and really naked for the first time

years later, with men
on thrumming Harleys parked above.

Another day I rubbed
against the guardrail
the crescents of the ass

the swimsuit missed, red and piqued
with sunburn.

Age three,
the boys just peer
around the pipe.

I don’t see their trunks’
wet bulge,
though in twelve years I’d take one of them

in my mouth. When the rain lets up
we bury stuff under the rocks:
a doll’s arm, bleached rib

of a fish. Underwater
the sun is a bracing mirror.

Maggie Millner lives in Providence, RI. Her work has appeared in Stone Canoe, Third Coast, PANK, and elsewhere. She is currently translating a book of Czech poetry into English.