We reach toward blue: moonlight, Stellar’s Jay,
naked sky. Our voices raised to sing waterfalls
and fleshy berries, but we croak
like frogs grasping leaf bottoms.
You have not come in two hundred days.
We roiled like waves in the moonlight.
We wailed. We wept. We held hands and prayed.
We wrote this poem to you.
Overhead, the sun grows hotter.
Under us, the dirt bakes.
Linda Cooper lives in Ronald, Washington and teaches English Composition at Wenatchee Valley College and Nature Writing at Washington Outdoor School. She completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University and her poems have been published in Verse Daily, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, Many Mountains Moving, Willow Springs, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Hubbub, Elixir, Diner, Pontoon, and many more. She also won the 2015 Orlando Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Allied Arts Foundation Prize. Her chapbook, Blue, a Waltz, was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2023.