the world's smallest lake

Megan Bromley

I bowl my hands under the water

the water, sheathed in thin oils of the hands. Water isn’t blue in the hands. It doesn’t fight the color
of container. It shows all the palms’ lineaments. Every possible past. Shows the rounded topography
of bone. Someday, I would like to build a house of hands, or clay. Or stretched-out eyelids tented
over the hollows. I would like to make a house out of smaller houses. Rather than bones. Because
any substance used to make a house will inhabit the house, I have a spiral in my ear. A house of noise
is a house of noise. House of so many names. House of fire house of “Burning Down the House”
house of crying in the car to “Burning Down the House” because I go home to a house made of
quiet bones. I can’t tell the bones what I love. I write it down instead, and bowl my hands under the
pages. It’s too easy to say I love something in a poem. The way it’s too easy to build a house no one
can afford to live in. Made of wood. A closed water line running through it. It’s too easy to build a
house out of wood and blood and write a poem inside. It’s too easy to say I love water in a poem and
another thing, entirely, to hold it in the hands. To build for it. It’s too easy. I love something in a
poem.

Water rushes only toward the ocean.

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Megan Bromley (they/any) is a poet and astrobiologist working concurrently on their MFA at Randolph College, and their PhD in Geological Sciences at Arizona State. They also work as a poetry editor for Revolute, Randolph's student-led lit mag. They have work forthcoming in Penn Review, and an old lady cat with speckles in her eyes.

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