Even the Air

Joyce Schmid

…even the air is independable… –HD

Lavender, why are you straining toward me? I am not the sun. Day lily, I have no reprieve.

And you, my little sister, when you grasped at me that day as to a tree-branch jutting from the shore, I didn’t know the rapids overwhelming you

were real and you were really being swept away.

Joyce Schmid is a grandmother and psychotherapist, living with her husband of over half a century in Palo Alto, California. Her work has appeared in Literary Imagination, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, Poetry Daily, and The Missouri Review.