water series.

I visited Triton today but he just turned away and melted into sea foam. Coney Island, too died and won’t return until you do. And you, with your soapy eyes and boyish mannerisms keep a ritual of rearranging yourself in an alphabetical order to last you the twenty-six days of the month. And you keep swallowing sea salt and drowning your little pink head under the green sound waves of motion sickness.

It’s been five years, I’ve swam across the ocean in the same dress that you loved so much, just longer hair. Longer hair, tangled with golden roots shyly peeking at the crown, and I remember you kissed it and called it a halo. 

I went out to the shore house today and knocked three times on the wooden carvings of the front door. Three times and my knuckles recognized the smell of chipped wood from those times when we belly danced with scarlet stains on our tongues. And a weary old woman opened up, her legs were pale with an emerald tint, bruised knees and skin mushy like a bed of moss. She smiled , exposing her purple gums and a golden snaggle tooth, which was closest to the child she ever had. 

I floated inside, noticing the stale atlases and globes stained with water damage, how the continents dissolved into a single variable , where geography no longer mattered. Imagine the world as a bubblegum,  where all is chewed up and swallowed at once. There would be no need for trains, the sky would be drenched in bleach and the ocean would be hungry for new suitors. 

Her husband worked as a cartographer, surviving both world wars. When she spoke her cheeks wrinkled up in the corners and her eyes started to dance and it no longer mattered who I was before. Each time she murmured, I’d catch a teardrop of vowels and consonants that were imperfectly sown by a trans-atlantic thread of her foreign home. 

A widow, an immigrant, she called and yearned, but by now three red-headed, freckled babes drowned in the loins and stew of her belly. And you could hear them giggling, and each time  they’d sneeze, the woman would quiver with a mousy hiccup. 

I asked her name but she interrupted, shifting her eyes and offered me tea. Soil-colored, earthy, it trickled down my throat, I smacked the inside of my cheeks together because it made me feel of winters by the railroad, and  the paper cutouts on the bottom of the cup, with ridges took a form of a North African canal. I looked at the world atlas crucified in the corridor , with red and blue pins marking each city the couple visited. Some were crouching over Europe,  some over South America and  some even Southeast Asia.

After the war, she took her mate on a trans-siberian to Ukraine, in hopes of finding god, of having him as a hope, knowing that with his help and all the candles bought as a source of rescue, this would just end in a higher paycheck for the church. Two days of traveling, but still the southern violets that bloomed out of his lungs could not diminish the truth behind science, and his lungs heavy with snowflakes of tuberculosis. 

It reminded me of how you’d always make me blush each time I smoked. You’d say I don’t want you to die, and I, well, I’d say let’s wait for new year, maybe this time I’ll stick to my resolution, and I never did. Instead I’d laugh and keep on buying soft pack cartons. Your moth girl, you’d say;with pollen on my left shoulder and grey sun carvings on my ribs. We’d waltz deep away from the hot city air , anywhere you’d want and you were never the kind to be afraid of resting in the autumn leaves. 

But the earth, was not your true home. The ground was way too cold for your lips and instead the seaweed cooled our limbs in the coral’s of Odessa’s jellyfish. 

And I try to exist in the present, yes by the book, being here now, but it’s not the same. Being here without you, I do not and won’t exist, I only breathe in the past with a forever yearning to swim in the whirpool of tomorrow. So I take your blue ashes, reflecting silver like fish scales and I kick off my sandals, because there is a storm brewing inside my lungs. Because the sand feels like a hot golden glue sticking to my ankles, but with my blistered soles, I will walk you to your bed and be sure to tuck you in just  right, so you’ll taste your childhood one more time.

I may be weeping but you’re so starry, and I touch the remainder of what used to be your skin, the waves are crashing and telling me to hurry and  give you back to Triton. But my blood is boiling now, I set you on the foam with the fish, our only friends, that will take you back to your pillow and when you rest, let the water bubbles be your blanket and sirens voice will be your lullaby, but dream of sea horses. Dream of them, and I will come to you with our golden snaggle toothed child, where we will exist and swim here now.