to be standing on the bow and to be drinking salt like that with it just dripping from the top of my
lip and the sound of the hull slapping and groaning
your mother raised you and she raised boys of the worst order with their soft and wimpy cocks
under performing under their strange arrogance in the night
you don't think of her but I do because she is what made you and I am what takes you, we are
different, I am falling asleep in a bed where I do not fit—overthrown by your softness and
the repetitive sounds of snoring
to be crossing a sound and having it shifting like this, where I shift my weight from leg to leg I
am watching the others take hold of anything solid, anything bolted down
that you loved me and disappeared into the trees, into the rocks that lined the sea there where I
ran and leaped and cracked the sky to find you nowhere on the smooth long beach
to find my salty taste against cold and wind and the crackling of skin
of eyes that opened and closed slowly
of visions appearing and moving deliberately
of the disclosing of one life for the continuation of your own
without knowing and without fearing
how it wasn’t your mother or the mother of any men appearing to me in the cloudly throne to tell
me a secret which meant to tell me nothing at all—a throne above sea
that my ascent to that throne would be fraught and occur so quickly
a side effect of all this medicine is the same endgame that brought me to these shores, that return
to ask for life, to ask for assurance, to avoid the pursuing things
your affection ebbed and billowed in those windy afternoons (you played them as mornings in a
skewed sleep schedule) and there was I as a little thing clutching a coffee cup in a window,
immobilized and disintegrating
my simple resolve to only birth women, any way I can, to combat the failures of other women
suddenly feels forced
a feminism of fighting women producing the son of women with the softest cocks (I cannot
repeat that enough)
Sarah Jordan has words appearing in the minnesota review, Rhino, Cosmonauts Ave., and others. She occasionally tweets @sajordan01