A GOOD WALK

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.