Matt Vekakis
Before Open-Heart Surgery
January 2025
The sides of the river have frozen
and only a small sluice of its down-
stream slips through new ice-berms.
You sit with old industry: abandoned
dams, a fiberglass mill, foundations
of old mill-housing. The green truss
of a pedestrian bridge keeps its part
of the river warm, trill, and moving.
Mallards drink-bird under the water-
line. When the river does eventually
freeze—and it will—you’ll go plod
the ice in dull skates, wintering over
all of the light that’s been left to you.
Matt Vekakis is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at the University of Florida. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Pangyrus, Southern Humanities Review, and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. He lives with his husband in an old mill on the Blackstone River.