About Solace and My Need to Shuck Oysters

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PINK POETRY PRIZE

Alt-text:

I’ll admit, sometimes

I wish the entirety of my body was bite

and tongue. How peaceful it must be to have no memory.

What would I know about the pain of being unable to speak if

my father could never spin stories about the times when all of us

were mouthfuls? All flesh, no heart. No knees that men could

demand I bend. My existence hinged upon nothing but my own jaw.

My abalone song pinging against the glass echo chamber of an aquarium

existence. A world in which I cannot see the walls, but the pebbles and

canyons mime the outline of their presence. What’s it like, I wonder,

to make beautiful everything that has come to murder you? To be immune

to all but the most glorious and bloody deaths? No pearl to mother,

I pull sand from the fresh trench of my three-hundred-and-

thirteenth cut, laugh wordlessly as life writes the script

of my death—no doubt a comedy of wrongs. By the time

I count a thousand, I’ll be little more than

the residue my words left on my hard opal

insides. A tongue, a language—

in the ocean of

synonyms,

they frequent the same reefs, rub against

the same anemones to stave off the sting of unfamiliarity.

Let me tell you the story of my own shucking: Language [the English

kind], with its razor fangs and riptide appetite, introduced itself to our sandbar.

An invasive species, it devoured our tongues and laid eggs in the half-moons of our

shells, sliced the fascia of our gravity, made us too weak to pull anything but ourselves

apart. It became so that no one could shave the beasts’ sick-silver scales without smelling

the stench of our death, almost like how it’s impossible to talk about the beach

without mentioning the waves that slowly consume its shore. What a marvel—

how two words that are such natural enemies can come to share the same

waters of definition. I’ll admit, this is why I’m too in love with the idea

of silence. Of opening my mouth and spilling nothing but brine

and maybe the occasional gem, if only to keep the greedy

honest. Show me a half-full glass, wet with stillness

and I’ll show you a gorge

° -ous absence of sound waves ° of immaterial disruption ° I’ll admit—I have spent ° far too

much time thinking ° But when you can sing ° only in the voice that haunts ° your nightmares,

you learn to savor ° solace like a delicacy ° to use a pen as a mouth, to shuck ° oysters without

making oceans ° of dry eyes. You learn to wield ° a rust-licked blade, to find pleasure ° tucked

away inside another ° creature’s concrete locket lips ° I’ll admit… sometimes I forget ° that I

was born ° all mouth, all tongue ° That the rest of my body ° the Language of me—is

evolutionary ° camouflage. A black husk ° shielding ° my softest parts°