River's Flow
By Richard Dinges Jr.

My mother carves bodies

from stone, rounded smooth

torsos with fat arms

held close, heads bowed

in, unwilling to let go

of the boulder from which

they are born, this stone

older than memory made

young again, slowly sapping

youth from patient hands

while my mother chips

closer to bedrock to find

that eternal smoothness

beneath her palms, created

by her imagination, a river’s

flow over stone, her fingers

spread into a verdant delta.