Something and Not

We kept walking that day, further than the last.Somehow the pond was here.The dense monochromatic heatwavehovering on the pathso that it bent the air with weightor atomic gnats.We left our lovers.We left ourselves.How we looked as children -how we looked as children filling in the silence.We felt such great emphasiswhen the cat-tails furred and shed seed.When the rains came for days and days -a skein of sewer run-off iridesced on the surface.We wanted all this. And the tree-rootbecame the place where we asked for more.This had everything to do with us becoming perfect.And much later, the world —____Ellie Tipton’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Pleiades, Pinkline, and Drunken Boat among other places. She is the former poetry editor of So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Currently, she teaches writing and descriptive grammar at the University of Maryland College Park and lives in Washington, DC where she is a co-host of the reading series The Ruthless Grip Collective.