Leap Years by Marissa Coon Rose

she melted from the thinnest boundaries of her place in the moment—three-thirty on a Wednesday in the year two-thousand-something-something– her stillness itself a sun dial with a long shadow that moves through time without knowing
what it means.

Leap Years by Marissa Coon Rose

We drove to the pond. Sandals on my feet,
blue rubber boots on hers, and I watched
as she flung herself across the parking lot

to the edge of the water, kneeling above the alcove
where koi bobbed up and down like orange silk threads
circling the perimeter of an embroidery hoop,

and it was only her with the fish and the broken fronds
of last year’s maple branches, her and the mud
that anchored her to the precipice and spread

reflections of her shoes across the water,
expanding her beyond her own footsteps.
And she melted from the thinnest boundaries

of her place in the moment—three-thirty on a Wednesday
in the year two-thousand-something-something–
her stillness itself a sun dial with a long shadow

that moves through time without knowing
what it means. And I thought about leap years
unfolding into spaces that do not exist

except when we say they do, the way
she taught me about how our human urge to mirror
ourselves across everything blue and deep

never leaves us. Even when we know
that at some point, a branch will startle
the stillness of the water, the fish will dissipate

in the most delicious play of forward motion
until they cease to be within our line of site.
The way all things go.

*

Marissa Coon Rose’s work is forthcoming in both Riggwelter Press and Apricity, and has appeared in Tuck Magazine, Tangerine Magazine, Facing LGBTQ Pride, and the Raleigh Review, among others. In 2016, Marissa was a finalist for Poet Laureate of the 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 and was selected as the representative poet in the collection, Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry.