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°
About the author
Ariana Benson is a poet-storyteller from Chesapeake, Virginia. She received the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found in ANOMALY, Lunch Ticket, Southern Humanities Review and Auburn Avenue, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor, and are forthcoming in West Branch, Shenandoah and an upcoming Diode Editions Anthology. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.