Mish Gajewski-Zambataro
woman in the reservoir
we’d thought we’d found a corpse when we came upon her floating. we thought, maybe this is the waitress who’d disappeared last month from the Denny’s parking lot, or that single mom with meth mouth, whose skinny kids had gone knocking on doors til CPS showed up, or Mrs. Watson’s husband finally went too far, or this was one of those tired eye-liner girls from the booths of the dine-in gas station. we remembered a movie about boys finding a body and dared each other, touch it. none of us wanted to get closer but all of us did. we stepped off the deer trail that loops the reservoir, into the weed and mud. we got closer and the corpse raised her head and looked at us with dark eye-liner eyes and took our orders and said, Mr. Watson’s not home at the moment, and she opened her meth mouth and she sang us a song and asked us to come in, come swim, then we were wet to our knees we are wet to our hips we are wet to our chinsas she sings us a song.