*Editors' note: Image text included to preserve original formatting

Alone in Huntley Meadows

Caught on the boardwalk trail, your steps will echo angry and you’ll feel
your heartbeat in your palms, thrumming from inside you out into the cries
of birds nesting in the cattails, here right before sundown light dwill leak
gossamer persimmon clouds so alike the patterned netting of spiderwebs
that stick in your hair as you bow to duck beneath alder trees, entering at
the edge of this marshland, where a woman you do not know has knelt, in
her bright blue parka, all alone, hands holding onto the aged edge of the
boardwalk, peering through the pollen rafts and flitting surface to the
tadpoles in the silt, breathing the words aloud without looking up it’s
beautiful, and you behind her could have said yes, could have stopped and
crouched and communed with a stranger in blue, but instead a grief unspools
from you, the music of ducks squawking out to find each other, reeds
knocking together as ancient snapping turtles crawl slowly beneath,
suddenly all so loud you cover your ears, you took yourself here, so lonely,
here where you’ll learn that everything is for you and not, leaving before
the sun can die for the day, untying your boots to drive in just your socks,
trying to be whole, checking your rearview mirror, remembering the blue
woman who must’ve seen her reflection in the water but looked past it into
these sudden splayed hands of marsh, frogs becoming frogs.

Katey Funderburgh is a queer Colorado poet. She is a current MFA candidate at George Mason University, a Poetry Alive! fellow, and a co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writers Project of Phoebe Journal. Some of Katey’s poems appear in The Blood Pudding, Ghost City Press, and Black Glass Pages, among others. When Katey isn’t writing, you can find her in the sun with her cat, Thistle. Or find her on Twitter @coloradoKatey.

Published January 15 2025