Swarm
(originally published in Black Tongue Review)
~after Virginia Woolf
The weather tells me how wooden I am, belly down to read the tide, trying to dry myself out of this drifting; I am ten again in Galveston, not feeling guilty for ignoring the jellyfish on the beach, never entering the water because of who might be floating in it, who might brush her body—part flesh, part vegetation—against my skinny legs (never mind the science of decomp; there’s always flesh); these days I know jellyfish are hardly breathing through prisms of oil, are like ovaries that men walk by with giant bags in which to collect them, to take them home, wash them off, string them into necklaces; these days I’d rather be stone.
