Lucia Galloway

IMMERSIONS

In the overheated church, a boy clasps his friend's hand as he makes his way forward for the altar call. That day he had ruined his clothes crashing through ice into a muddy stream at the bottom of the hill where he was sledding. All afternoon he sat in the classroom in his brown-stained union suit while jacket, shirt, and trousers hung drying by the schoolroom stove. He mashed his brush in a pot of water and a smaller pot of paint, muddying his paper like the coat tails of the circuit preacher, like the cloaks of evangelists since the founding of Christendom who must wait for warmer weather to resume the baptisms of the converted. A river will serve. So will the shallow waters of a farmyard pond. The boy will remember only this: the heat of the June morning and the scratch of hay in the barn where he stripped off his sodden clothes. At water's edge, mosquitoes knit the air with their rasping whine.

Lucia Galloway has published a full-length collection of poems, Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010), and a chapbook, Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). Recent work appears or is pending in Comstock Review, The Dirty Napkin, Foundling Review, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poemeleon, qarrtsiluni, Red River Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and Untitled Country Review. She is the recipient of several awards and prizes, and she curates a monthly poetry reading series in Claremont, California.