ode to (pleasantly) drowning in a pink tidepool on world poetry day
By Anabelle Taff
the cherry-blossom ocean backwash laps the hump of my chin,
splatters over my rose lips. saltwater has never tasted so delicious.
i smile at the authoritative sun and tiny, fuschia fishes nibble
at the pads of my toes. the flat of my palm glides against
the pastel, sediment walls. i massage the magenta barnacles, so pert
as they pulse and ooze like a strawberry crushed in a toddler’s fist.
i’ve always had an affinity for the water. how it can move through time,
how it can give and take beautiful life, how it can swallow a person whole.
water will hold you in its distended belly, swish you around until you’re
a chunk of waterlogged bubblegum; hard and tasting of your own breath.
even as you garble, thrash, scream beneath the surface,
you are at peace.
the beach has amaranth sand. the sun hangs low over the flamingo skyline,
twinkling with white, and bright, and powerful, raspberry stars. a watermelon
crab clip-clops her lotus claws. her army emerges from the crevices
of the morganite boulder and their crustaceous, ballet legs glide over my thighs,
headed for where i am guzzling the elixir of hot-pink atlantic-body before i,
too, suffer the curse of flavorlessness.
Anabelle Taff is a butch poet. They’ve been published in Fruitslice Magazine, The River, and have a piece forthcoming in The Sandy River Review. They are a staff writer for a sapphic magazine called PlayButch, a tutor for UMF’s digital humanities and video game studies lab, the program director for WUMF 91.5, and a student life community assistant. In their free time, Anabelle enjoys playing zero-build Fortnite, listening to Fernando by ABBA on repeat, and convincing their friends that they could perform an intubation based purely off of what they’ve seen in The Pitt.
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