Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2022
Meniscus of Warmth and Silence Elya Braden The dark sea near my home refuses to hold my name in her mouth. Her language bound in the hard consonants of salt and north. I pace her hot borders, outside the reach of her greedy gulping tide, stare at her as through a glass wall, tempted and barred. My spirit returns to me in water. She larks with a pod of dolphins, a hundred-year wandering of sea turtles, a neon spectacle of tiny fishes flashing their bright markings in a saline game of hide and seek in coral reefs sheltered in a cove south of Kona. She plunges into the cliff-face depths off the coast of a Balinese island whose name has long since skipped off my tongue. She gawps in the shivered silence of below, in the shifting shadow, the bubbled breath, the flick and thrust of flippers wedding me to all that glides beneath the surface.
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