Dear pigeon guillemot,

      I watch your black head disappear
under private blue stretch
                                    your red-shock feet
                                    your own riffle
                                    of tide alerting me
                        to wait

                        what you might surface – small
                                    fish, worm, crustacean, mollusk
                                              or octopus –

      I hope you do not
                        discover a season of spilled
                                    oil or some other
                                              careless irritant
                                                        propelled from warmed
                        over rocky shores

          instead the water shifts
with all its questions
          smoothing away
my own quite
          my own sour surface

This poem first appeared in Writing the Land: Windblown II anthology.

—

Ching-In Chen is author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems, recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), and the forthcoming Shiny City, as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member and Airlie Press editor.