Cora Schipa

Brackish

I don’t cry until I get to the shore
and see a dog with an icy stick in its mouth.
I think of hunger, your small square teeth,
the smell of that place nestled between
your jaw and ear, skin hot and saline, 
pixelated with tattoo.
Winter stings the air,
gives it the desperate bite of a stray. 

I press the bruise of your memory.
Last year we were in a room
viscous with sweet radio country
and furnace heat, red wine
on empty stomachs.
You were supposed to be sober,
but the world outside was so dark and unimportant,
we could’ve been our own orange planet
barreling through space.
I curled on a couch red as
the underside of eyelids and wrote:
so in love, despite.
We were marshland kids in someone else’s
mountain home; below us, rivers hurried
towards a taste of the Atlantic.
Isn’t love a visitation,
a settling in to the worn comfort of a house
whose bones you’ll never really know?

The cordgrass crackles with icicles.
Last night I touched someone else gingerly, carefully,
and remembered how I’d lick the salt from your body.

I don’t stop until my feet are cold granite
darkened with sand, pain blooming up my calves.
White ibises fly oceanward like sails.
I realize how far I’ve walked,
the sky a wound of light, dog gone,
my starting point invisible around the bend.

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Originally from San Diego, Cora Schipa is a poet and writer who spent most of her life in Charleston, South Carolina, before moving to Knoxville to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Tennessee. She is a reader for Grist and the assistant managing editor of Crab Creek Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in ONEART: a journal of poetry, Unbroken: Prose Poems and elsewhere magazine, among others.