a river flows under the sidewalks

By: seren mcclurken

I am always religious in the summer

When the wounds of childhood are freshest - where God is found in the fireflies and the

forgotten children,

In a little yellow house tucked invisible between round green mountains, soggy with decades-old abuse,

I pray the rosary down the hall from the reason I quit my dream job.

He’s here in the sweat of emptied new york, in the echoes of the beat mystics, where Patti called

Robert once a west coast Saint Sebastian --

Did you know Manhattan once sat on a salt marsh, she tells me, all buzzing and green? Did you

know a river flows under the sidewalks?

Did you know there is still life here, underneath the hardness?

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seren mcclurken is twenty-two-year old folklore student living in the hills of southern indiana. they use they/them pronouns.