Portside

Drought

By Diane Moomey

You could, fed up

with red and blue flashing lights

and sickened by the siren howls

of human misery that never stop, could

slip through any window and follow

the thread back to Narnia.

You could

backtrack your own trail

and know that, had you turned north

in 1981 instead of west, he might

have said “yes” and you might now

be sitting in a different chair.

Or not.

Or you could, reflecting upon lawns

and empty lakes and on the vanishings

of certain birds, either slide into a glass

with ice, or, ranting, take to the streets

and by now, both those roads will lead

to the same place.

It’s been such a long drought. So many

things were never born.

A regular reader at San Francisco Bay Area poetry venues, Diane Moomey has published prose and poetry, most recently in Mezzo Cammin, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the 2016 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition. To read more, visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey