I shouldn’t say I’m grateful
for the years without supervision,
when we were little girls
exploring beaches past midnight.
You—just taken away from your Mom
and mine dead. At the cliffs
you stepped into mid-air
arms against your thighs like a spear.
When I jumped after you,
what a jagged relief
to be caught by the surface,
eyes shut against the plunge.
Without gravity, water
touching everywhere, investigating
air trapped in my nostrils,
my puckered genitals, the sea
attempting reunion
with the liquid of blood.
We pulled hoodies over
wet bathing suits, roamed barefoot
past storefronts with sarongs
and pretty glass pipes for sale.
People dragged couches out
in front of their apartments,
sat under palm trees with nothing to do.
Boys biked with beers in their hands.
At night they set the couches on fire
as if angry at the ocean
for holding something back from them.
We broke water with our skulls
as dolphins do, past breakers pushed further out
for the pleasure of being precious in an empty sea.
Dove down into the biggest room a body can enter:
below us the eyes of stingrays by the hundreds,
wings buried under sand, and overhead
the surface licking air in deaf motion.
Even when the water formed walls
trembling high overhead
and thrashed into white oblivion,
I pulled myself out and wanted to do it all again.
I didn’t know I was forming religion,
my god a molecule of oxygen
and two hydrogens, splitting open
reforming back to water, they say—the universal solvent.
I suspected someday the world would enter me
and tear me apart, blood returning
to the ocean like rain in deltas,
humidity in breath, coolant hissing
from engines on the freeway.
Remember we used my food money
for bus fare, met your Mom at the hotel she’d scored
under the over passes, where the estuary,
lined with trash and oleander,
spread out for the sea. Your Mom and sisters
took up the bed so we slept on carpet,
pulled hotel towels over our hips as blankets.
Karen, I don’t know the price you paid.
When we were teenagers
no one hated you for your beauty.
Well groomed girls from beach houses
circled around you like mares, as if your brawn
would trickle out to anyone standing nearby.
And when you got caught with a boy in a stolen car,
they sent you to live with another aunt in Canada.
I got my driver’s license,
drove to the cliffs after you were gone,
paddled into surf:
seconds in the hollow of the spinning sea
exchanged for abuse, the ocean’s muscled hand
on the back of my neck.
I loved the high of my heart
shooting it’s volleys of blood,
hot against the cold Pacific,
the sea grooming me to struggle
for small euphorias.
They say oceans arrived on asteroids,
covered Earth in liquid, then ice,
then both. When I moved to Ohio the sea rose
into corn fields when I ran,
tassels fluttered in tidal rush, endorphins
flooded the serum of my synapses.
The ocean made me want more
than my share of pleasure. I bargained with it
at bonfires, pulled away
from the arms of lovers to get closer
wanting it’s attention to myself.
I’ve gone back to the arch
where we jumped when we were kids.
Skittish at the edge now—my shoulder injury
and bad knee, I can’t throw myself
into the ocean anymore. Karen,
I wonder if it’s enough for you now,
to know it’s out there—the liquid
of Earth, our two-faced guardian
it’s violence and silent birthings,
the krill and squid, numberless creatures
rising to surface every night
in the safety of darkness.
This poem first appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader.
—
Katie Olson Afshar grew up in Southern California but prefers the redwoods and feral beaches of Northern California. She is a pediatrician with a deep love for the human body but conflicted feelings about modern medicine. Her work has appeared in the Sun, Catamaran, RockPaperPoem and Hunger Mountain, among other journals.
