Maria S. Picone

Minnesota, late October, 2007

Maria S. Picone

It felt like the beached whale I mourned, salt spleen wind sea birds sea sick yearning

It felt like a retirement party for summertime ending in Florida jokes, punctured balloons

It felt like an inside joke when I typed this title, your intimacy of insults for this New Englander,

It felt like we had sailed to the end of the world & realized it was nothing but more summers receding, whales beaching, worlds ending—

the belly of it too big, too religious for the mere swallow of my body, censured from the pass

port of our united states. Starless, star-crossed, we found shore; we foundered;

to survive, I ate our memories, the way the panes of your cabin shivered, cracked up under winter’s rhythmic skirmishes

& on waking it felt like the branches of my heart stiffened up in the night, up against this hard frost.

Maria S. Picone/수영 is a Korean American adoptee who won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, The Seventh Wave, Fractured Lit and more including Best Small Fictions 2021. Her work has been supported by Lighthouse Writers Workshop, GrubStreet, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. She is a 2022 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Kundiman Fellow and Chestnut Review’s managing editor. She lives in South Carolina and is also the poetry editor at Hanok Review and associate editor at Uncharted Mag. Her work explores hybridity, identity, languages, and pop culture. Her website is mariaspicone.com, Twitter @mspicone.