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Volume 14 • Number 1 • Spring-Summer 2022

Marsha Foss

Sin Titulo (Untitled)

from the photographic series "Water Wastelands" by Señor Manuel Piña 

A title gives no hint
to help understand the story
of a man diving off a concrete pier 
somewhere in Cuba.

The stark photograph
captures him in swim trunks,
already wet before this dive.
Water slicks his muscular legs.

He has not removed his shoes --
perhaps headed to a place across the water
where he will have to run
on a stony shore.

Small waves, high clouds, no land in sight.
The black and white of the picture
do not reveal the color of the sea, the sky.

A man's naked back
glistening,
poised on the edge.

 

"and you murmured in your tents..."

Deuteronomy 1:27

Always they were murmuring during those 40 years,
dissatisfied by this thing or that which had gone wrong.

My tent pitched so securely in the solid earth of you,  and I believing always in your faithfulness and strength were nearly destroyed.

So I stepped out    of the stagnant air  of the shelter we had built together and I stopped murmuring  and I shouted instead to the wind.

Marsha Foss, a retired educator, divides her time between her two favorite states, Minnesota and Maryland. Her work has been printed in Third Wednesday, DASH, Tiny Seed and Atticus Review, among others.