like learning you, exposing me
Growing up away from the water has not meant that I love it less, but that I love it differently. The pull of tides is strong, like blood rushing to my cheeks when hand to hand and mouth on mouth, like a wanting inside that waxes and wanes with the moon but refuses to ebb away and leave me entirely. I am shipwrecked far from the shore, so far that the sand in my hair speaks to me of the violence of missing home in its hushed, revered voice; so far that I lay shells at my window when the morning light breaks in over my suburban sprawl (like arms and legs and the body bent, like sheets and pillows scattered from sleep) to show that I still think of waves. I may not be able to smell the salt in the air, but I can taste it with the copper of my morning coffee, and that is just as important.
I am in love with an intimate sea,
spread over no one’s map but the one I chart in the hopes and falls of breathing,
holding itself master over the rough and heavy stones I wear around my neck, smoothing them
soothing me.