Far Away
My daughter calls to say she had an unexpected encounter
with a green iguana. I live in the north. She is far away.
As she talks, I look up iguanidae, knowing my textual knowledge
won’t persuade her to move back home, regardless of the facts.
We don’t always speak the same language, she and I, the distance between us
longer than the flight between here and Miami where she first saw the iguana
blinking, proudly stalking a path through the underbrush by the pool
like the taste of summer, the lime after tequila.
I could tell my daughter that green iguanas have a three-chambered heart
and a parietal eye, how males bite when they mate. I could lament the fate
of too many endangered iguanas, trapped in glass boxes, just to keep her
on the line. I have so much more to say, but she’s gone.
Sarah Stockton, MA, is the EIC of River Mouth Review. Sarah's poems have appeared in Glass Poetry, Rise Up Review, The Shallow Ends, SWIMM, Kissing Dynamite, and Crab Creek Review, among others.