Size / / /

A bee once stung my mouth, you see.
I learned to tread the water's edge,
ream oranges, and sunny dawns drown
honeycombs in pools of salt and lye.

They'll say I never was a steady gal,
but long before you came again
I'd started drawing maps, each route
where X was the rag-tatted lace I would place

near my carpenter's warm human heart.
They'll say I was sea-drunk, skirts netting
old cod; these bowed hips (they'll say)
could do nothing but buy. Cheap as sand dollars,

faithless as women can be,
when the sea spit you back
I raced out of my carpenter's pine-hearted arms
with a ring finger tattooed salt white.

Six ships carried you on the salt
salt sea, and one moored on land
to ferry me. Gold-heavy they bobbed,
ruby-laden they swayed all your hulls

to point east Friday morn.
They've told it before and they'll tell
it again: how I loved you like stars
on a scale. What they miss so do I:

my carpenter's lathe-riddled hands,
birch-white band last I tucked
in his pence-empty seams. The truth
of the matter is I always knew you:

gravestone heels, flash of teeth,
viper tongue. Lye won't scratch.
But bees return, too, and I knew
how to do it. My hands were as clumsy as mice.

They'll say hollow and mean it, but how
could they see just how sweet I can spin?
It was ten holes I made that day: him, you, and me.
How those bows tackled under like ice.

We see land but the orchid-teeth sand's
not for us. Seven ships I set skimming
across the salt sea; let your sins be kissed
breathless by water. I win.




Pamela Manasco is a writer, editor, and poet living in the Birmingham, Alabama area.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
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