Lea Marshall

Twice

In my dream when I went to pick up the baby
she was smiling, eyes dark wide and liquid,
seal’s eyes, there in the dream-dark. Had she
swum to land to find us? If I touched her,
would she turn slick and muscle her way back
to the sea? Years ago, in a waking conversation
with my own child I asked about a time before
she was born and she said,
The ocean was still making me.
Do I remember this? Is it not for me to seek back
farther than the span of my own body to find her?
She was not the baby in the dream, the seal-child.
Only now as I write this do I realize that child
was the one who came before her, the one who
broke me open but never came to land.

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Lea Marshall is the author of The Slow Hammer of Roots (2025), published by Broadstone Books. Her poetry has appeared in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, The Penn Review and Rogue Agent, among other journals and anthologies, and was most recently named a finalist for Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets and Palette Poetry’s Nature Writing Prize. Her arts journalism has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she worked for 18 years as Associate Chair of Dance & Choreography and later as Director of Research for the School of the Arts. She works as a grant writer and lives in Virginia with her family.