onedaynine
The earthen pier curls comma-like from the land.
Better yet, it’s an apostrophe marking possession,
converting the loch into a word absorbed in water.
At its barbed end, a girl takes up handfuls of rock,
the substance of its body, and chucks them with
machine-like precision, a whirling varmint raising
holy hell. I feel for rocks—the way she feels for
rocks, spinning in the wind like a roadside prop,
a steady arc and a steady splash, the fish thinking
the rain changed to brimstone. The pier doomed,
the loch’s possession lost, she begins to relocate
Scotland. One spirited girl throws a pier across
a loch, and before her parents realize it, her wild-
ness becomes a moving mountain taking back all
its possessions, until there’s no place she can’t go.