Style: Poetry
Statement: Love poetry is not as easy as I thought it was. Fish seemed like a good alternative.
it is a desperate thing with clipped fins, this feeling. i am trying to write about a girl again, but the
undertone of salt hangs in the air like mist. it is too easy to write around her, to avoid the thrum
of minnows teeming in my guts, thrashing beneath my diaphragm, pushing out laugh after laugh
because that's all that is left in my lungs when she is in front of me. i am writing about fish again
instead of writing about the girl. i trace her silhouette into the sand with a finger tip. i get close to
something resembling her, but—did you know that salmon use magnetoreception to find
their way to their spawning ground? i wonder if they know they are going home, or if they
suddenly wake up from the sea bed with impulse thrumming beneath their scales. i think i am
treading on that line between choice and compulsion, just drifting toward her. there is a big
lipped thing with a swollen head and whiskers that feel out my chest. i worry that by giving it a
name, it will swallow me whole. the memory of adolescent summers rises and recedes like
currents. i am too young to already be dreaming of dye-stained popsicle sticks, isopods
underfoot, and stealing from seabirds. i am too old to be staining things with moss and salt. i am
too scared to admit that i am dreaming of the girl. that i am dreaming of home. i wish i could
write about her, but i am left tripped up by every heart-stone-skipping cliché. love is too big of a
word—the four letters of f-i-s-h fit better on the page.
i guess i mean to say: there are too many poems about the ocean, but also too many about
love, and i am just now understanding why.
Comments