Seaside
If you gathered those who once
claimed their love as my name
each would pull you aside, rough-palmed
and storm-eyed, saying
press your ear there,
to where the lungs slip past the bones
they will tell you how to gut me,
force me open to the crowded air,
each will show you how it’s done
with smiles harpoon sharp, mischief
gleaming, fish washed ashore.
Believing is a net cast, a bounty.
These fishermen love the sea, as they loved me
and how they long to pillage, to wax poetic
with the tides sweeping in and out of grip,
how they smell their pillows in the cool, sweet night
for the salty spray of my passing,
how they taste conquest when the waters shout and cry—
they have forgotten me there, where the waves crash
like half-hearted suicides, there at the open coast
of my sea body, salt-crusted and lonely
as a late September afternoon.
Ariel K. Moniz (she/her) is a queer Black poetess and Hawaii local. She is an editor and a co-founder of The Hyacinth Review. You can find her through her website at kissoftheseventhstar.home.blog or staring out to sea.
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