EASTERN IOWA REVIEW
  • Home
    • About Us
    • Guidelines
    • Masthead
  • Current Issue
    • Issue 13 - Winter
  • Past Issues
    • Lyric Essay Issues >
      • The Lyric Essay
      • Issue 10 - Spring 2020
      • Issue 8 - Spring 2019
      • Issue 7 - Print Anthology
      • Issue 6 - 2018
      • Issue 3 - 2017 >
        • Editors Note - Issue 3
      • Issue 2 - 2016
      • Issue 1 - 2015
    • Themed Issues >
      • Issue 4 Contributors & Samples
      • Issue 5 - The SmartApocalypse
      • All Things Anne - Issue 9
      • Issue 11 - Hope in Renewal (An Intermission)
      • Issue 12 - Water
  • 3 Sisters Awards
    • The Christine Prose Poetry Award
    • Dory Ann Fiction Award
    • Maggie Nonfiction Award
  • Chapbooks
  • More
    • The Prose Poem
    • Fictions >
      • Contemporary Mystery
      • Dark Fiction
      • Debut Fiction
      • Fan Fiction
      • Honorable Mentions
      • Literary Fiction
      • Mythical Fiction
      • Speculative Fiction
      • Woods-Western-Mountain-Appalachian
      • Young Author
      • Unclassifiable
    • Prizes
    • Interviews
    • List of Contributors
    • Donor Report
 ​
​
PROSE POETRY​

​SUZANNE S. RANCOURT

WHAT APPEARS ABANDONED, MAY BE INCUBATION


​I have found peace here at the river’s shore that people insist is a lake which it is not.  Just ask the stones muffled by sludge banked over rotted homes flooded by the dam in 1930, eminent domain.  Ask them about the gutted deep current that spines its way unnoticed by motorized wakes. This is a river, sure as the dead it never gives up still wedged between scuttled autos by the rolling belly sands of progress. This is the river torso-wind rides for free with its erotic undulations that press each stone. Someone once told me that the first time they heard water with their new hearing aids it sounded like glass shattering. This valley shattered into a river that people insist on calling a lake - moaning not sharp - not splintered but in curves, or roundness, coming from the mouths of the people in the water. Their presence a peristaltic voice. They loved this valley too – born here, gave birth here, farmed and died here before the dam, before the flood. This is a river that innocent children, boys, summer, a luxury, that only poverty can turn into paradise. This is a river.


Picture


​About the Poem:
Entire communities were decimated to build the Conklinville Dam which opened March 1930 in the name of industrialized progress with little to no regard for the people whose land, lives, homes, were sacrificed. I was sitting down by the water and often there is a presence. This poem emerged from the water.

Of Abenaki / Huron descent, Ms. Rancourt’s book, Billboard in the Clouds won the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award. Her 2nd, murmurs at the gate, Unsolicited Press, released 2019. A human being, being an artist, is a mainstay of strength. Ms. Rancourt is a Veteran. For a list of works published visit www.expressive-arts.com

All rights reserved.
© 2012-2021, Port Yonder Press LLC
6332 - 33rd Avenue Drive, Shellsburg IA
www.PortYonderPress.com