Your body held so much of me, more home
than the house you ran alongside, the one maroon wall
we painted, the panes of glass quieting your tempers
as we watched you fatten with storm, more refuge
than any mortar nest. When was our last moment?
Was it the time I’d gone down to see which trees
they’d torn from your banks, which
neighborhood beagles survived, lapping
your mucky edges? Maybe it was before the handoff
when I dragged the kayak over for a final wet swaddle,
the sand a particular grit I’ve never found again:
not fine but thick, grains matted into one being.
I dodged the cypress knees, tracked the osprey,
egret, occasional gull. Something smelled like blood.
A cycle of becomings. Your acrid scent, half gone
sunfish, half skin-soft driftwood, rotting, half spoiled
quahog. Soaking the swamp I waded through barefoot,
the tangled underbrush netting herself into a womb
for me to hide in, splitting ham sandwiches
with white bread and Miracle Whip, that awful fraud.
Bay of quicksand, ghosted blueprint where H swore
she saw the deer go down, the dusty road along your bank
where we rolled the golf cart over that rattlesnake
and heard its maraca alarm. At the end of each wobbly pier
we watched you swallow God up every time.
Let me see you again, muddy footed on your bank
to catch the pod of dolphins who got lost
that spring Sunday, tried to smell their way home
to the delta, swimming upstream as they weaved
in and out of you, the gleam of your skin
on their skin. O wreck and savior, I pushed the dog in
and didn’t flinch at my swelling violence. Yes,
the house’s rotting bottom. Yes, the downed trees
blocking the only road out. That swing set you rose up
to pluck from someone else’s yard, our borrowed joy
after the storm. You were everywhere. Even there,
by the inlet, in the barn that midwifed all those kittens,
bursting open. Those drowned trunks at the bottom,
gruesome stench of new life, how you held death
in your same reeking mouth. I’m still taking notes.
This poem first appeared in Southern Humanities Review (2023).
—
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.
