"Water Rises in Odd Ways and "Landlocked: Near the Four Corners"

Water Rises in Odd Ways

Everything was elevated.  Everything.
High risk, heeded by bed rest,
propping her feet, misshapen,
pale, easily marked, when pressed,
a plush pile to alleviate the swelling
just one month before the due date,
butter mints, the palest were purchased,
balloons, helium, and latex,
expanded enough to float aerially,
as harmless annunciations
tethered to a string,
faint blue, recognized
when clouds brush against each new day.
A boy, breaching with the readiness
of a river cresting against the levee,
his mother carrying him to a place
where the ending became more imminent
than any day of birth.
Never mind flooding or accumulation. 
Water rises in odd ways. 

Landlocked:  Near the Four Corners

With her mermaid, made from oyster
pearl, iridescent name,
her family saw her less and less.
 
They worried about her obscurity,
no sing song salutations any longer
or solicitations to try something new.
 
Hallucinations, faces turned
into a liquidity of deep puddles,
lines, grimaces appeared as ripples
 
her small homage to an ocean
never visited, only imagined
with its perfect litany of blues,
 
the repetitive alliterative lull
from azure to topaz
that marked each hour.
 
Where were the fish,
the beauty of plankton
floating like baubles?
 
These were the manifestations
of the brain bleeds,
the little tributaries,
 
countless capillaries
bursting within the lobes
after she was beaten to bear
 
internal and external bruising,
skin sharing the same pallor
as any storm approaching.
 
Only twelve miles from home
speculation, that she, she got picked up in the desert
by a tide of empty ocean side promises
 
followed by a sinking certainty:
she was driven in the direction
of what always goes wrong.