Rage Hezekiah is the recent recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, who earned her MFA degree from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Glassworks, Columbia Poetry Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, as well as other journals, and are forthcoming in the minnesota review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her writing has been anthologized in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out and All We Can Hold, a collection of poems on motherhood.
February Cove
We are ten and bundled crown to toe
scaling frozen boulders on the beach,
our parents home and snow day drinking
no longer watching from the window.
I claw wet rocks in your wake, desperate
to keep pace, soak my wool mittens through,
neglecting numb hands. You are a boy
fresh with adventurous, outdoor ideas,
brimming with strange stories. As we climb
you tell of sharp-toothed creatures buried deep
in frozen ocean, point into the distance
where jagged rocks break the placid ice,
a hundred little births along the surface.
With our arms spread wide we run
along the snow-covered sand, almost expecting
to be caught, like how we secretly hope
we’re found during every game of hide and seek.
Bathed in a frantic energy we generate for fun,
both of us panting plumes of warm breath
into air, salted-cold. We embrace the tension
of fear and exhilaration here,
the last great year of our imagination.