Poems by Michelle Hendrixson-Miller

That We Don’t Move Fast Enough

by Michelle Hendrixson-Miller

From Canary Summer 2024

Michelle wakes up just a few hours from the Great Smoky Mountains every morning. She can be found on weekends kayaking the Duck River, one of the most biodiverse rivers in North America. This waterway contains several species of freshwater life, like the pearly birdwing mussel, found nowhere else on Earth.

That even now, people who love, drown
on the edges of Appalachia. That grass here
browns and cracks while I cautiously wish
for rain. That my long list of things to do
will change nothing. That zinnias wither
in beds like underpaid garment workers.
That I cut and pile them in the yard—
grave of flowers marking their own grave.
That I was eleven when I fell in
a river. That I clung to a limb as a boy
my age rushed to pull me back. That
I looked it up—it takes twenty seconds
for a child to drown. That either
we get it right now, or we don’t.