NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Portrait of Self as Running Water

Poetry by ​​​Brett Cortelletti

Heraclitus said that no man steps in the same river twice,
for the river has changed and so has the man, but I bet
that Heraclitus never saw a slough, which is more
of a permanent puddle than a river and even though
a slough may flow after a heavy rainfall even that only
lasts for a couple of hours and I haven’t changed since
I was seventeen anyways, just started wearing jorts
for the sake of practicality rather than irony, which means
that moving rivers might be my chance at change.
In the Eastern Sierra Nevada, you can walk uphill along
the Owens River to Sherwin Creek to Laurel Creek until
it’s just a leaky snowcap, and that makes sense, because
it snows eight months a year there and three thousand
feet below the water still runs cold, but what about
the Ohio River, which is fed by the Muskingum River,
fed by the Walhonding River, fed by the Mohican River
fed by the Black-Fork Mohican River which was fed
by me when I used to offer it a bucket of water from the tap
every afternoon around lunch time? I haven’t lived near
the Black Fork for five years and there are no snow caps
to top it off, and it there is less than an inch of precipitation
a week and what if all the rivers and streams gave out one
by one until there was no water left except for the ocean
straddling Miami and Venice, plus what the taps have to spare.
​

Brett Cortelletti

Brett Cortelletti is from Mansfield, Ohio. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at Florida State University. In addition to being a reader and a writer, he is also a competitive long-distance runner. Most recently, his work has appeared in Switchback Journal and Clarion Magazine.