Vivian Wagner
D.C.
The Potomac and the Anacostia converge,
here where everything is shaped and molded,
marked off, a sandstone block every mile,
a hundred miles squared and cornered.
The rivers, though, flow fractally,
sometimes here, sometimes there,
meeting with slightly different
opinions of curvature each day,
ripples joining together chaos.
They speak what the city denies—
that it was burned and rebuilt,
that one moves out, another in,
that limestone columns only seem solid.
And quietly, at night, streetlights
whisper with oak trees about the
surreptitious movements of shadows,
the secret strategies of water.
Vivian Wagner is the author of the poetry collection The Village (Kelsay Books, 2017) and the memoir Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington, 2010). Her work has appeared in Muse /A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Eyedrum Periodically, 3QR, and other publications. Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.
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