To die with sea foam in your lungs
They won’t let her speak. Maybe she had never wanted to.
Maybe they had never asked why her eyes spoke more than her mouth ever did –
wide, expressive pools of blue she inherited from her mother, Ocean.
Maybe she lost her mind.
Her life was a bunch of maybes plucked from the seaweed,
woven together into a funny sort of wreath to be placed on her grave.
Her history is understood as they want it to be; stories of her death, of her love,
of both these things in holy communion –
a lesson to young girls about the stupidity of their dreams.
The girl who gave up her life for a man she didn’t really know.
They call her driven mad for love; sanity paused through silent interlude.
Of course it’s love, for what other emotion (other than fear) causes the
heart to stop, the mind to blank, the mouth to close like a kiss?
You may become human forever, the witch had said, if you can get one to love you.
Without a voice, he could not know her.
She feared she could not know herself.
To be voiceless is to be invisible, as fleetingly tangible as sea foam
carried on the ocean’s waves like a ghost in the corner of a mirror,
a shadow on a curtain.
When she finally broke through the surface, the warm, loud world around
her teased words from her mouth while she inwardly chastised her frailty.
She drew beneath her imaginary shell like some defensive crustacean,
a relic of what she’d wanted to leave behind.
She wanted to go forward, but she kept being pulled into the current, backward.
And backward.
Until all that was left was a cowrie, and the nostalgic,
gentle whispers of some far-flung waves inside.
Published in Issue #27 of Underground Writers Magazine, August 2019