You’re a body of water I want to sit beside

by Amelia Mertha

Art by Emma Cao

Before ocean, there was wasteland peeling away from itself rotting like collar sweating from bones

wide-eyed cryptids / sighborgs / my mother were the only bodies of water back then

called the bending arcs of our waking forms: horizon (her eyes on)

called our waking forms

a humble gesture nine hands exoskeleton a certain salting godless

Before ocean, to gut feelings was to take a knife to detritus bowed gatherers picking at anything left too long out in the sun a glitch a scab a shimmer & distant lovers could only sing the stretch between

So we asked the birds for guidance (Remember they showed us flight path & play?) (Remember we called the flurry of wings swim?)

They said, liberation is to make a sky in your image

Becoming ocean, we discarded the border skin and belly-up lazed all over this wasteland in the tiny mouths of crevices and caves opaque and naked

all these bodies of water, a new sky below— chanting

show me show me

and swim