*

David Krancher once edited a literary journal called Dark Horse (based in Somerville, Mass.). He’s published poems in Dance magazine, Wilderness House, Dark Horse, and Bagelbards. This poem, like many others, is part of character investigation for a novel-in-progress called Stealing Color.

David Krancher

Page Kiss

At the pond he’s still as a crane,

reads a book of red leather fine as

a Bible from a white man’s church.

Why does that story roll his eyes?

He turns. Does he feel my stare?

He doesn’t notice his cork dance

until his fishing rod falls and he

dives to save it before it swims off.

Fish hold no magic for him—words

fill his eyes. Would he find magic

reading my lips, a negro girl?

His lips twist and talk to the book—

his eyes love a story I cannot know.

My eyes love a boy I can never kiss

so, in my dreams, my arms hug

all the library of books he owns.

Does he read of white fish boys

who kiss brown fish girls even

when Papa bites their tails off?

I could be a brown fish girl, too—

wave my tail at a white fish boy.

I’ll dance to your stories, if you

solve the mysteries in my fins.

I wade in the pond behind cattails

until I’m close enough to read lips.

He calls for Sophia, not for me, yet

the mud warms between my toes.

I’m a book of a thousand pages he

can turn forwards or back again.

If I can flutter his pages as he traces

my lines with his tutored fingers,

I can wink at him in this chapter,

and the next, and the next.

— David Krancher

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