o, goddess

you love to dance near the coast. the sun blesses you with golden sweat and you can envision yourself as the tide, enveloped in the folds of your seafoam gown and falling and rising. clam shells beneath your skin are a shattered bridge to olympus, and you weep for it can never be repaired. and poseidon peers through his kingdom, seeing your ocean water leaking, and gifts you with a mangled sea goddess.

and you become the mother of a crumbling household and nurse this precious sea girl. she stinks of seasalt wine, so you settle her down in a moonrock bathtub and begin to scrub. delicately, you place lavender suds beneath her eyelids and drown her soul in unfamiliar waters. flailing like a sunken moonfish, she clenches onto your thin wrist; flesh upon flesh and she is of your kind. the stench is but a shore when you are done.

she digs her nails into your skin and you are littered with crescents. you praise your daughters masterpiece and decorate her as well.

blood stains her shattered teeth; it’s a lovely painting and you’re quite proud of it. she tears algae from her cracked scalp and you snap your fingers like a lightning bolt; she screeches thunder. the gaps in her flesh become ancient seas and you cackle; for you love a goddess so you are sacred.

now men loiter away on the red concrete and, humming an old sailors tune like a broken siren, you pluck sea glass from their skin. you want to peel them like mandarins; braid their pulp into a bracelet and call it beauty. you do look divine in red.