Beach on the Great Sacandaga Lake

     When the Sacandaga River was flooded in 1930, people chose to remove houses and buildings to new sites 
     outside of the flood zone. Some structures remained standing, including a railroad with an abandoned, aging 
     train, which are now at the bottom of the lake.

Children are building cities
in the sand
All of them have rivers

They pull buckets of water from this lake
that is secretly a river, make rivulets
that satisfy their god complexes

I don’t like you! yells a girl
at a boy who has interfered
with her creation

The sky is a tumult of cumulus
and thunderheads
chasing across the blue

A woman pulls a banana out
of her tote, peels it for a toddler
who is drenched and shivering

The wind shouts at the wide
surface of water
and the water answers

---

Carol Graser’s work has been published or is forthcoming in many journals, including Apricity Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Evening Street Review, Hollins Critic, I-70 Review, The MacGuffin, Midwifery Today, So to Speak, Southern Poetry Review, and Home Planet News. Her collection, The Wild Twist of Their Stems, was published by FootHills Publishing in 2007. Since 2003, she’s run the monthly poetry series at the legendary Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY. She has performed her work at various events and venues around New York State.