The Local Tourist by Amanda Leonard

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Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip Arrive by Car at Niagara Falls, October 14, 1951. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

Niagara. She is my favourite painter.

Because I taste limestone on my eyes’ parched lips and swim with carelessness in her urgency in constant motion

Because she is felt on the back of dawn
And not popping within of free fireworks, as she holds a much deeper secret

Her body, decaying with duplicitous effigies of her story, a story of erosion, of two bodies of water, meeting

A story lost without capture, lost outside the frame

Dipping my toes in such honeymoon
Of past loves
More luxurious than any fiberglass tub dripping with scarlet passion
And more than his thick hands on the steel beams hoistening up more divide, parking meters

She is beneath me, underneath those man-made islands
And searchingly, meandering to lower ground,

And its because her sound reverberates on the other side of the world

She sits still, in her royally crescent moon as time flowing through her like silk, changes her

Until, high beams flash in my rearview mirror
Telling me to move along
I have been staring at her for far too long

Source: Amanda Leonard, 2020

Amanda Leonard is an English/Visual Arts teacher who enjoys writing and sketching. She was born and raised in Niagara Falls, but has been nomadic for the last decade.
She is currently writing a novel that is set in modern day Niagara Falls.

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