Twisty
Sarah Sarai
i.
Like evil, coral reefs have history. Like witches, they are old. Like old ladies’ feet, twisty. Coral roughs up your soles.
ii.
In the sea, all things dream.
iii.
After Pangaea busts up and the great re-sittings the sitting land-lumps sit missing. Reft of familiar comfort. Set upon by clods, new earthens now numbskull and nudgy. Faced with mud and dull conversation. Coral dies.
iv.
Coral is back, then Whammy.
One hot meteor plummets. Like love, it breaks us open. Light dims. Coral dies.
v.
An alchemic formula and an inclination to mineralize. Coral returns after the extinctions. An inorganic will to live.
vi.
Of coral did I / contrive a crown / for my cheatin’ love. / She bled out.
vii.
In the oceanic archana of an immersed coral reef, nightmare and savior are individualized and universal, like family. Flora and seaweed are leotards swaying. Coral is not organic but neither is it nonresponsive.
viii.
Did your aunt give you a coral charm, girl? She thought the ocean served her.
Sarah Sarai’s poems are in The Southampton Review, Otoliths, Prelude, Barrow Street, Ethel, Zocalo Public Square, Posit and many other journals. She is the author of That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books), Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books) and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX).
