Ahrend Torrey
Image by Serge Le Strat from Unsplash
Ahrend Torrey enjoys exploring nature in southern Louisiana where he lives with his husband, Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat. He is the author of Bird City, American Eye published by Pinyon Publishing (Montrose, CO) in 2022, and Small Blue Harbor published by the Poetry Box Select imprint (Portland, OR) in 2019. His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA and MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press.
Watery Dazzling Dialectic
(or A Gender Proem)
inspired by Elizbeth Bishop’s poem “Santarém”
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©2022 West Trade Review
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Look at those two rivers, those two rivers that Elizabeth overlooked while she lived in Santarém. Not the sky, of gorgeous under-lit clouds she saw. But the rivers, where the green-blue river meets the muddy river—muddy-brown like the Mississippi. It’s the Tapajós—merging with the Amazon. Look at the meeting of the two, closely; more closely than you’ve ever looked. Stoop down in the boat. Kneel on your knees in the boat. Lean over the edge at the very touching of the two—where the seagulls shimmer off the water— where sun glimmers. Push down your palms at the very line, then scoop them up: the two distinctly colored waters. What do you see now, cupped in your palms? Not the dense brown, like first you saw, not the green-blue, but another color, another color.
Listen to Poem Here:
