Ocean breeze coats my skin, tangles with my tongue,
draws me with its cacophony. Pebbles crunch, just rocks and rocks
and rocks, down winding stairs and murals warning:
at your own risk, grab the rope, snag a root.
Salt sea crashes into gray rock shore,
shatters silence with its seaweed-strewn tide.
I don’t know how many have gone into the water before me–
ice into veins, heartbeats stuttering, breath constricting.
All that remains are tattered scraps of color
hanging from hooks, tucked against the carved rock wall.
The water comes farther in, swallowing the beach,
tentative and aware, reaching its icy tendrils
till it curls around her ankle, unwilling to relinquish its grasp.
She rises from the water, wetsuit clinging to her like a protective layer.
Next to me on the rock, her skin wrinkles and sags,
escaping its black seal skin confine. She’s all smile lines and
gray-blonde strands and confidence as her body drinks in the air.
She’s what I see in the space beyond the horizon,
memory and hope and emptiness tangled in their confused dance.
Droplets trail down her breast and then–
I can hear the siren’s call drawing me to the waves.
The current’s strong, violent, tangling my hair,
distorting my perspective, and it’s been too long since
oxygen entered my lungs but then I’m rising.
Body peppered with cold, marked, changed,
eyes shining because this must be what a metamorphosis feels like.
Skin scrubbed clean, heart shocked, delivering
life to oxygen-starved limbs. I don’t think of
the cliff’s edge or the screaming gulls or the reckless abandon
of that first plunge into the water’s embrace.
Green and orange and amber–
fragmentary shapes, jagged edges worn smooth,
softening sand and grit and chaos
and a thousand other words meaning
pain, destruction, redemption, epiphany.
Hands scrabbling, searching, desperate,
grasping salvation from broken pieces
that may never fit together again.
After, my body tensed as air met skin met moisture.
Adrenaline constricted my throat and disguised the blood
that dripped down my leg, the price the water took for my return.
The shedding of blood not the shedding of skin
but a gift all the same. A mother’s heart
beating for her child, two lives contained in one.
Just as blood gives life, so too does it rush out.
A tide staining legs, a cry of first breath,
the whisper of last–remembrance.
Anna Stowe
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