​(PROSE POETRY)

WHAT APPEARS ABANDONED, MAY BE INCUBATION

​SUZANNE S. RANCOURT
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.
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​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