Isle

I was raised in small-town isolation, a town that never
GREW to more than 120 people, surrounded by corn that went
UP above my 5 foot 8 inches of bone and mostly fat, weaned
ON processed food because it was cheap for a family of seven,
THIS being rare in a place of stick-figure senior citizens with a
TINY post office my mother ran, a co-op of salt blocks for cows, a
LITTLE bar named Smiley's in a frowned-up village that became an
ISLAND every spring when the Elkhorn and Logan rivers flooded
ON the streets up to the 3-foot porch where we crouched, watching
THIS ferocious inundation bring some variety at least into our
TINY crotch of dry existence in the Nebraska Flood Plain, this
LITTLE nothing I could not wait to escape from, but I realize I am an
ISLAND no matter where I go, living in a big city that also soaks
UP the wet of everything that invades – exhaust, neon, loneliness
I dread, missing the fresh floods, my siblings, the lulling boredom I
GREW to miss in this urban mess more drowning than a river.