Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
Swansea
Our daughter’s voice rises over hills of stories spoken by animals
—Now they are all escaping a flood on the farm.
She is four and stakes out her playground on a sarong—
her toy dogs, farm animals, tea set presided over by a raccoon.
Rain streaks the eight-foot tall windows of our B and B.
Later, the corner pub invites me with the marquee
Come on in and have a relaxing good time—
I escape the rain to order a cheese sandwich and lemonade,
awkward in my Woolrich jacket. The Beach Boys sing
“God Only Knows,” and young Welshmen in tight jeans sidle next
to their blonde girlfriends, tawny beers bubbling in glasses at their tables.
Rain has blown against trees all day that tower over the small lawn
where yesterday two teams of men in white shirts played boules.
They rolled the heavy ball toward tiny markers and solemnly took note.
Clouds now shadow the wide bay, and tires screech on wet pavement
against the sea raking the shore in cadences rough as Dylan’s.
The tide has calmed to small breakers and pulls back beneath the sky
still lit past ten o’clock; pebbles mix with drizzle, asphalt, rings of seaweed.
Our daughter whispers the last words of her game: The flood is over.
It is a summer of twilight. Tomorrow we will leave behind row houses
that have stood for decades against storms and slip through this town like pennies,
unaware to whom the factory lights from across the bay signal home.
About the writer:
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Cave Wall, and Terrain.org. In 2017, Red Butte Press at U. of Utah published a letter-pressed folio of her poems called Invisible Shores; and her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. She is a two-time winner of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums original writing competition in poetry.
Image: Flood in Ohio Valley by Gregor Perušek (1887-1940). Oil on canvas. 41 x 37 inches. 1937. Public domain.
