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.