River's End
The gray river water
meets green ocean
snakelike power
meets grace
wide and cold
fresh meets salt
tastes like blood
roiling over stones
its roaring power
muted when it flows
into the dark
vast sea
waning black
in last hour of night
Rising sunlight
golden-pale across
white-capped waves
a line of stars
shatterstretched
across the surface
broken by
wave after wave
rising harder
power to
knock us
off our feet
and back to the sand
where I wrote
his name
with my
finger
Elizabeth Donald
Elizabeth Donald is a writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is the recipient of the Mimi Zanger Literary Award and three Darrell Awards among other awards. She is the founder and zookeeper of the Literary Underworld small-press cooperative, president of the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists, A freelance writer, and is pursuing an MFA at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville while teaching writing and journalism at SIUE and St. Louis University. Her horror, science fiction, and fantasy books include the Blackfire and Nocturne dark fantasy series, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. She lives with her husband in a haunted house in Illinois. In her spare time, she has no spare time.