Alyssa Ripley
Spillway
BAGNELL DAM, LAKE OZARK, MO
When the sun hits the surface of the Lake just right it looks almost beautiful, the fullness which once came gushing through the manufactured seams like teeth. We are born with all the teeth we’ll ever have already in our heads. As we age, the floodgates open. I pull myself to the water this way. Or it pulls me. Something instinctual. Something mechanical. Something cutting its way through, snaking across the land with a silent slither that says more about control than restraint. As a child, I watched my parents get high & went to bed hungry, my tummy knowing what they’d spent their money on instead. This place has jaws, too. Has veins, crisscrossing & pumping & pumping & opening & opening & opening with hinges that haven't buckled for a hundred years since the Osage River first ran through them, spilling itself over metal and concrete slides where the artificial meets the living. The Lake asked to be born as much as I did. That is to say, not at all. Here is the place my world began. A thousand miles of coastline in the middle of Missouri. When my father & I take his bass boat out for a morning fish, I’m jealous he knows it better than I do. Better than he knows me. & yet we’re here together tossing our lines in sync. He’s at the bow, using the foot pedal to turn toward the bank & the rocky shallow incline where the fish are shaded & warm. I cast off the back & into the cove. The water is too deep to catch a good bass out there & I know that. I could ask him to turn me toward the shore instead, but I don’t and just watch as he drags his lure along the gravel, feeling for what might bite.
Alyssa Ripley has an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University-Camden. Her work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from Chicago Quarterly Review, DIALOGIST, Crab Creek Review, and others. She is from Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri and now lives in Philadelphia, PA. You can find her on twitter @alyssssa_rose.