Manatees
I spent that blistering
summer, unabridged, flattened
like driftwood in the
sharded-salt-sand, Anna Maria Island,
Florida ‘08, coughing
questions into my palms,
eyes dusting over the
tangled branches of Adam’s arms.
I tried to make sense of
the heat, solve it like an
equation by pressing layer
upon layer of pasty SPF-70
sunscreen across his back
while the bulbous manatees
somewhere subaqueous sunk
their millstone molars into
ragged clumps of tangy,
sea-lawn. I wanted to watch them
exist, plug my nose, scrape
the bottom of the world with
my rented scuba-gear as
they swam concentric patterns around
my miniscule, vegan body. Of course, I just remained,
pallid, toes gutting the
jagged, lethal ground before me,
hallowing and hollowing a
path to Adam’s out-stretched
body. I sighed,
perpetually; cradled his cranium with my pinched-flippers:
he is all rough shell, all anger until you know him.
Subaqueous
in the after-cloud, wire
lungs bent
in the inhale, still trying
to remember how
to exhale; I stare at the
ceiling fan, humming, buzzing like concentric oars
searching through air for
answers.
I
can feel it now
the subaqueous, the ancient
call of life
from which we emerge and
diverge
and I am afraid
so I hide in the
underneath, the underground,
toxic sealed bunker, panic
room, metallic grave
hidden deep sub-terra but I
still hear the murmur, the ghastly, phantasmic panting of
a life secretly forming:
building only to be broken, breaking, breaking apart, breaking away, shattered
inside of my broken breaking
beaten body,
I
can feel her now
separated in the
subaqueous, just crystal
and malleable thought,
flotsam on the surface now
I
said, I am fucking afraid.
Eva
Monhaut is an Honors English major concentration in Creative Writing and double
minoring in French and Sustainability Studies at Indiana University South Bend;
she will graduate in December of 2020. She enjoys writing poetry, reading
copious amounts of books, drinking coffee from oversized mugs, cuddling with
cats, lifting weights, and spending time in nature. Her published works include
the poems "The Infant" & "Hay Mowing" in Brainchild
Magazine (2020) and "Prayers" & "Fragments of Light: In
Sepia" in Analecta (2019).