by Amanda McLeod
The body is a wave
This morning you made for the bright water
like it was your mother, she who first knew your body
as a wave, read your floated comma
of spine and shadow. How right that we still use our salts
to remember, a wet grey sponge
to forget. We dive for the once-boat and once
I too was unfinished ribs. The jealous sea
had already wrecked the knot in my chest
her own creature
for the long voyage back to darkness, said ah but here
is a wave who will break, and break, like he might dance
correctly, meaning arms, hands
become small flights of gulls – swoop
and fall, traceries – a dropped heartbeat on a screen
maps across long pale paper
as tidelines on the sand, as conducted birds.
Would that my bones, my beat
could stay buoyant enough to rhythm long
the foam-line, the screeling sky, but as we surface
right this second on your nape the light describes
a flare, a droplet, a lighthouse warning
tender rock of vertebra, star-pulse, strobe-syncope
and I cling to you and we are a wave
and a particle – simultaneous and all-at-once and what we are now
will last less than a breath
will explain the machine of the sun.
Commute with the birds
Morning is a step into a cage – these crowds are made of birds
who should have flown. We flock aboard a northbound train
to move these bodies made to move themselves – deny each day
the hollow light inside our bones. We fell into this, all species here;
pin-pinioned town-crows in blackdrip raincoats, crooked
encroachments of elbows, heroned angles
in the ribs – umbrella beaks jab a knee
out of line. The window clatters pigeons, greywing
roof tiles rising from houses. They seem escaped, but they roost
as tight as teeth, then overhead wires
cheesecut their flight to death. Even the crowded air of this city
is a maze, even hedges snarl at each other
over borders – all leaf-memory
of crown-shyness lost. Where are their nesting forests
for their trunks still neighboured snug, yet blue rivers of sky
mapped around their outstretched hands, where one thing sheltering
respects the canopy of another. And from a different train
a lost morning snipped a glimpse of starlings
on the pier in their thousands, still spacing
themselves a möbius of flight, and not one was drowned
by the draft of their launch. I have missed
my stop, remembering
that a single gannet will unpress from the colony, soar miles to fish alone.
Thrown dart of a body, spiralled tight with purpose
beak first to the water. Oh singular, oh greedy, oh fed by falling
over and over from one world to another.
Franz Josef Glacier 2020 (will they say)
In the pitching dark, the origin sea
is flooding – a black vein swelling deep below
a white-chased wound. The ice
does not yet speak of the secret bleed
but keeps all her movement spare and slow. It befits a victim
blued tongue cracking effort and berg, to accept
that each hundred years slicks down its own groan
but these short months are a spreading bruise, frozen flesh
fevering hit after hit to wear a giant down. And when they examine what’s left
before it liquids the records into pressed ocean
will they say: here is a streak of whole continent
gone to dust, slapping down palms orange with ash, paint
of fur and tooth and bone. A smear there, the fatty soot
we ourselves thumb into
when a mountain stokes the forge it always was. Will they say
why so clean from this point on, what stopped
all the engines here – oh just let it melt. Even glaciers want to forget
what’s coming next. Return the witnessing to water
where nothing has even begun to remember.
Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed, queer-identified poet from Aotearoa. His work has been widely published internationally, in print and online, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. You’ll find him and a lot of sea photography on Twitter @SeaGoatScreams or on Facebook @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry
Amanda McLeod is an Australian author and artist, with a penchant for wild places and quiet. Her work has appeared in many places both in print and online, and her flash fiction collection Animal Behaviour was released by Chaffinch Press in 2020. Her work has been shortlisted in several writing prizes, and won the 2018 Marjorie Graber-McInnis Short Story Award. She is Managing Editor of Animal Heart Press. Find her at amandamcleodwrites.com.