With a modified line from Traci Brimhall’s “Auto-da-fé”
There is nothing here for us
in what was once the town of Custer-Herron,
now the bottom of Norfork Lake.
Because they exhumed the dead and flooded the church
when Arkansas was broke and needed jobs,
now there is nothing here for us.
We imagine dark algae slithering over drowned pulpits like drunken
walleye, rotten doors swimming in the currents soundless as ghosts,
as photographs, down at the bottom of Norfork Lake.
Listen: I don’t know if I’m Southern—my mother came from the North,
my father from the West, all of us thieves without anchors—
and there is nothing here for us
where we swim on summer days, our tongues muddy
with Coca-Cola and tales of drowned schoolhouses. We float on our stomachs,
eyes open in green water, burning toward the bottom of Norfork Lake.
I reach my hand into the depths, cool where the sun disappears,
because I’m asking for something to come to me—a heritage
stuck in the throats of catfish—but there is nothing here for us
at the bottom of Norfork Lake.