self-portrait of winged — The Lighthouse

previously published in Waxwing Magazine

Lately, I have been searching

for bodies that swell pregnant

with brine. In the Louvre,

I touch marble

blistering on doorways: one unending gaze

flung against history's frame. Small

disasters. How long before I find the remains

of cities I cast

into grief? Only netting

in my hands, too quickly stitched to

stillness. I have seen the dream where I stand

atop a ship's hull—

what it is to play

the captain of a flooded land, harpooning

the faces of grandparents I have

never met. Around me,

statues bronzed

by foreign hands. For eight years,

I busied myself in the endless

walkways of the West, each exhibit crashing

into the next, learned to forget the aching

of these salt-struck

wings.

In a different country, I do not drown

myself in the sea's embrace. My name

hurled to the wind. An anchor caught

on this broken hull, obliterated by light. See how the tides

erode each unspectacular

victory, how I always

return to fistfuls of foam.