Joanne Esser
Joanne Esser is the author of the poetry collection Humming At The Dinner Table, the chapbook I Have Always Wanted Lightning, and All We Can Do Is Name Them, (Fernwood Press, October 2024). Recent work appears in Echolocation, I-70 Review, Great Lakes Review, Dunes Review, and Orca, among other journals. She earned an MFA from Hamline University and has been a teacher of young children for over forty years. She lives with her husband in Eagan, Minnesota.
Getting Drenched
It has surprised me on those rare days,
that singular pour of color
when dusk-filled sky settles over the lake
and I am walking, looking up.
I notice the aching pink, the purple sag,
the warm orange edge of cloud
draped heavily over mirroring water.
As if the sky is so full that it might overflow.
I stop then, begin to sip it, drop
after drop of color as if it was liquid.
I open my lips, tip up
my head, lick at it with my tongue.
I let it overflow my mouth,
run down my chin, drip onto
my shirt. I stretch out my arms
and let it pour on me
as if the liquified twilit sky
was a storm. Rain down on me,
I beg, because I am parched,
yearning, walking in the midst of a drought.
Drinking the sky. Drinking, really,
the love the sky holds, a promise
I want to trust. Not knowing until now
how thirsty I have been.
I thirst for what I can’t touch in this world,
what is formed in some purer realm. Stream
it down, Rainmaker, Sun Sower, Sky Lord,
let me be soaked in this goodness.
I walk home then, slowly, the long way,
my shoes squishing, my hair dripping,
and wring out the light
from my holy, drenched clothes.
