a little spell

I wonder how the turtle finds himself attached to his shell. what does the
turtle feel at the juncture between skin and exoskeleton? soft bodied into
hard casing, imagine wrapping yourself forever in a tiny home that
travels with you on the current. watching the turtle waddle, the duck
hobble, I love the spindly legs carrying around a round little body. shake
ya tailfeather and bob into the pond. put your thoughts in neat little rows
by the water’s edge, they might be picked up by a ripple lick. I go deeper
and try to feel the slippage between my bones. there’s plastic in the pond,
outliving the ducks.

then suddenly I’m wondering what it felt like. so sick to my stomach, in
the belly of it all. I am enraged. I did not know death and loss could do
this to me. find the junctures in me, pivotal moments I tried to smooth
out, between my softness and thorny bits. I had put away the tragedy of
accidental death, sunk the memory so I could not dwell on the only time
my father has cried before me. I think to myself do I need to pray for him?
Praying is done like this, I hope.

I’m in deep at the kitchen sink dish soap foam running up my arms,
water climbing. remembering how when my body hit the water at Riis it
felt the horror of the loss. if I can admit to myself that I am feeling—I
have a guide. I won’t be left stranded. but he was. and that’s it. I am
terrified of the suggested darkness. so I have this poem with a hum,
expulsions, pulsings with light and I can’t locate the feeling of so many
months past.

as I go within, I find the cave’s hollows can stretch for miles, yawning,
bleary, clearing in the wood. I was alone out there and then, with the
oaks, moss making shadow out of spirits. alone, held, alone as the world
set afire, then welcomed back to hell.

Rotten fruit—the U.S. food supply chain is breaking they say and well it’s
been breaking for hundreds of years beyond this exhausting news cycle,
empire continues failing forward into a pool of melting plastic. That’s
what happens when you pull death out of the earth.

cherry juice on my pillow now, i remember when the beginning felt
endless, a future torn, askew, time gaping open. what i would have given
for another’s touch in april, my neck ached with want for a hand on my
throat. now here in the late twilight of a hotter season, touched just the
last night, the fog has set in.

grief for him, grief over him, grit in the jaw for her. all this stirs in me is
a want to hold everyone close. a want is a thing, between the shell and
softness. it’s the point of flexion as your arms bend to encase another in
the last embrace until the next time you touch.

waiting. patient as I have been, patient as it comes. if i look solely for
pleasure in others, i miss the potency, miss the potential of patience to
unfurl into depth. but it’s no wonder to wish after it, after pleasure, i
mean, if it’s just that good, you know. Leo placements have me purring,
pet me until I fall asleep and forget into dreaming—

the other night I met B in a dream. He was seated, speaking with
someone else who was there, sharing a greasy bag of fries. I asked if he
was getting well fed. there was levity laughter. We hugged giggling. two
golden retrievers had seats at the table, and they started howling AWOO
in unison. the round table held an atmosphere of love and sound. Full of
AWOO with a want to hold.

and alone out there I saw: a soft slippage into the sea, as has been
customary since those who crawled out of their delicate world of sea to
make the land a home, is happening here where you stand and all around
the island’s untraceable edge at once. think of it as though the ghosts
leave kind, little trails

of water reaching back out to meet its wholeness
and muttering crabs whose worlds’ span the air and underground arise to
feed in ghost’s wake.

what does the water
carving fine trails in the sand
remember?