Elya Braden

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.

At night, I sink into the lavender and eucalyptus waters of my soaking tub, porcelain bowl of memory, containing every footprint on every beach I’ve ever gamboled. The washcloth’s drift recalls the tug of kelp around my ankles while the sponge’s bleached honeycomb floats under shifting icebergs of bubbles, all hiss and pop, scribing ephemeral faces, animals and continents across a meniscus of warmth and silence.

Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, California, and is Assistant Editor of Gyroscope Review. Her chapbook, Open The Fist, was released in 2020. Her second chapbook, The Sight of Invisible Longing, was a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition and will be published in 2023. Her work has been published in Calyx, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Coachella Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received several Best of the Net nominations. www.elyabraden.com.