First the Air is Blue and Then Bluer

After the neighbors’ son died, my brother and I waited as the fleet of cars left
the driveway, crows pulled by invisible strings. We broke into their backyard
pool, the beckoning surface spread smooth as a bedsheet and just as still, eager
for our flail and watery wild, slick hair, prune fingers. It might have been hours
we lost ourselves in the cool estranging green, handstands and full ears, heavily
buoyant. I didn’t hear their single car return but I remember coming up for air
to find them, her sensible low heels sunk in the dampened grass, not speaking,
for we were still breathing and there was nothing to be done.


Carey Russell’s award-winning work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2014, the Iowa Review, Tupelo, New Millennium Writings, Barnstorm, American Athenaeum, and the Cumberland River Review. She received an MFA from Columbia University and now lives in Washington, DC.