by Ankh Spice
Begin again—born to cold-swaddle- sea and she wraps me to nurse this grievance with gravity. The sinews of snap-and-blast let go. Grit floats from my hinges. It is very early, the water’s skin thinned to eyelid, and whole worlds cradle rocking behind the fold. I ‘gator, sightline only for the ripple, smalled disrupt of my body mapped onto hers. All the disquiet I am, she writes larger, out and out forever but gentle as a pulse of jellyfish and yes out here I understand the thumb on every scale heavy more than anywhere else. Rain begins. She embraces each child as he falls, soon overcome by a chatter of circles, spreading brief astonishment— O, O, O— then, again, murmured part of her vast. Me too, me, too. No way to tell why my face is wet. ____
Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed, queer-identified poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His work has been published widely, with several poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is a joint winner of the Poetry Archive WorldView2020 competition. He’s a co-editor at Ice Floe Press, a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, and shares a lot of (often-moist) photography and poetry on Twitter @SeaGoatScreamsPoetry, or on Facebook @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry. You’ll find quite a lot of his published work here: https://linktr.ee/SeaGoatScreamsPoetry.
