Mary Hawley
Mary Hawley is a poet, fiction writer, and literary translator (Spanish to English). She is the author of a poetry collection, Double Tongues (Tía Chucha Press), and her poems have appeared in Mudlark, Tipton Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, The Plentitudes Journal (forthcoming) and other magazines and anthologies. Her short stories have been published in Hypertext, Doubleback Review, and elsewhere, and she has received an Illinois Literary Award in fiction. Her translations of poetry and prose have appeared in The Common, TriQuarterly, La Piccioletta Barca (forthcoming), and other journals. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Jet-Ski, Lake Superior
On that day when the waves rose around us
I knew there was no sympathy in them
but we didn’t turn back—instead plunged ahead.
My daughter was driving, me clinging to her,
our eyes stung shut with every slap of wave.
The water, beautiful and indifferent: what if
God is like that, no sense of humor, only a force
pushing toward us, never hearing my little stories.
She gunned the engine over each foamy slope,
sliding into one channel and then another,
another. Seven miles of waves and she took each
one carefully, planning ahead. By September
the lake is even colder, we were too far from shore.
I have worried about this child, we have screamed
at each other, but that day the wind blew words
back into our mouths. There was a power in us,
stupid as it was to be out there. We should have
turned back when we first chugged out of
the harbor’s mouth into the ominous waves,
past an eagle perched on a mooring post,
drenched in the spray, but we went anyway
and something changed, hasn’t changed back.
