Emily Raabe’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Antioch Review, AGNI Online, Eleven Eleven, and the Brooklyn Review. She was a 2003 finalist for a Writers at Work award, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Spring, El Portal Emily Raabe I told you the story in the kitchen, shouting over the shouting river. You examined your hands, the thin lines in your wrists like the snaking of blue on a map, then gave your apple a name and went hungry. Outside, the Merced river churned, a sullen Chinese river harnessed barely for rice. Every day it rose further, crowded with stones from the high country, swallowing unsated the neighbors’ dog, two or three trailer homes, the hotel bar built too close to its banks. The story: Roger Williams died, was buried, became an apple tree. The people in Rhode Island ate him every fall, inside the reddened skin and sweet white crisp of the crop and when they dug him up to move his grave, they found only roots like limbs in the shape of a man. That night the river entered our yard, its long arms calling us awake. We reached across that silent bed as water jostled the doors, then imitated lonely, begging to come in. After would be different, the house like a boat barely moored, everything canceled for days while the river called in its debts, and one of us gone by summer, but that night we lay together and let the river in. It didn’t hurt       as we thought it might, so we filled and filled our greedy mouths as the water rose dark in the house.