Something inside me smears its greasy
fingers all over the good until
its oil-heavy wings no longer fly.
Where do you put your broken?

                                    That’s what stingers are for.
                                    I bloom and sting. Sting and bloom. 

Is it enough to let yourself be carried?

                                    No greater joy.

But what about this want? This need
to go left when the current goes right?

If there is wreck in me, let it be
             anchor and all. O you beautiful ones

with your jackal call. The steel trap of you
             in your meadow starred with flowers. You honey-

throated ghosts. Ripples in the windless hours.
             My Dead are waiting at the bottom.

Sing the bees free of me that I may listen. Sing
             the wound clean out of the skin. I come to you

lying down in my petal-thin excuses—
             you already know my name. Sing me soft-

Vietnam drowned in a lake last year. Pat say
that’s why he don’t fuck with no fresh
water. Pat say only ocean buoys island bodies
enough for the risk of the moon in the early
morning. Pat say nobody brown need
to be fucking with a lake—at night, no
less. We toasted then—tagay tagay
Filipino style—to Vietnam, to his body
claimed away by a vexed moon’s tide
even though Pat didn’t even know youngblood.

The copper carries my wishes.
A storm snapped a dozen trees
the week you left; the same

straight firs cut for masts.
The gazette held no word,
no sight of your sails. Each week,

my fingers traced columns of ships—
Flying Cloud, Lion of Waves,
Golden Empire—with titles

broader than their beams,
bold as thoroughbreds, as if
a name could seal a fortune.

My mind slipped to the ocean
floor, littered with wrecks.
I placed silver coins

When he keeps trying to steer my chin
towards his lighthouse face
despite my whispered insistence that my lips are not lost ships
He sees fit to flash that charming smile and rescue me still.
He is a sailor he says
and knows these seas well
I remind him that I am a mermaid
and know them deeper.
It's just a kiss, darlin'
and my no slips under my tongue polite as pearls.
It's just another inch of your scales onto land

Close your eyes on that startled
vision: fishing line strung taut
by the waves’ tall pressure: cold sugar
of a fish’s mouth clamping the bait’s steel
surprise. Hold fast against the tide, its spray               
finer than pleasure against your sun-
ruddy face. Understand there’s nowhere
to go. I mean you have nowhere
you must go. The men look
for men, the women seek
women and the seagulls approve
with the rough spanish of their wings
and throats. What we trust is the sound
of the sea, its chill shock, our faith

The puka shell has a hole that is not bored or broken
but found and threaded makes a string worn for luck
or safe voyage, now not common, though still casual,
beads formed from other shells or even plastic. But
the snail that coils inside the shell is as beautiful if not
more so than the shell found on the shore, flesh striated
and luminous, attracting attention, but has venom—small
ones like an insect sting; larger ones can kill—multitude
of compounds, finding ground in medicine, paralyzing

All adventurers have contingency plans.

Say a man chooses the sea, wants to feel the wind
           curl under his coat sleeves, wants salt
       in his eyes, wants deep swells he can ride
  like his own unbroken pony.
                                               But he’s afraid

of the bottomless: someday it might pull him under,
            tumble his bones into rocks for polishing,
        split his belly like a seed bag of pearls.
   It’s happened before.
                                     So he’ll clutch

Keywords: absence, being-for-another, undertow, thalassophobia, phantom limb

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