On the Nature of the Speaker of My Poems

Let’s be done. An auditor of my imagination groans: I don’t know what to do with all of this. Well. At least we can agree that clearly, I don’t want any of them to faint in a beautiful arc. Manicure your own wilds, if you must, but I’m not in your cards. Don’t sow neat rows in my briny snarl. My scattering gulf of rusty & rosy-eyed sharks. Swank & sunk them, yes. Crawlers. Galloping into swoop. Down dark hawk. Shark-harkened horses. Shark-shaken redemption. & when music won’t do, you ask me to strike. Through it all, every wound & slow chew. I end up right in the fight. Cults. Lackeys. Your own heroes. I even fill in for your stuntmen. & every time pass over like a fleet of pegasus. & know what they’ll do. One breaching softshell. One a reddening bull bullying the alpha narwhal. One awakening a patch of sea junk & thorn, a touch of sunspot spiking the narrow cage. I am your enteral exodus. Dragging so many spines from dim waves. I live forever. Call me beneficial hardship. Or evolutionary anarchist, like your ancestors did. They didn’t get it either. Why I devoured merpeople & their partially digested sailors. Why I had to. Early on. Reveal doubt is most real. & its secrets rarely let anyone amputate a single line, tear them away cleanly from anchors & appetites. I just want to find closure. I know. That’s why it took me so long to keep certain things for myself. Almost the same, the why, the who. I’ve no need for memoir. All of it is here. Feral & still hungry. All of it true.

Read more from Issue 23.1.