Feature Image Credit: Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo
He drifted through kelp, broken
scalp diffusing red like squid
ink clouding itself. Crowded, the spiny
urchins hinged their drift west. He slept,
I knew, towards his death. What harm
could there be in waking him?
Through...
Illustration by Marina Mika
We know you only by your absence.
The hole left behind, pressed
through the drifts like something
fallen from a great distance.
Wings shorter than we would have expected,
stumpy and round as a sliced orange peel
and your body a footless...
Painting by Anne Bachelier
Your once-silken voice will desert you, your legs
will make every step on land a torture.
There will come a time when you miss
the seaweed and seals, your old ways,
your old body. Now fit for neither land
nor sea,...
My feet leap in the world of Faerie
My body dances in my sacred grove.
In my eyes, you see something wild –
something you cannot tame and take
back home to your castle to meet your king.
But you will surely still try.
My...
I tore off my skin in the moonlight and became a seal, sleek
and noisy. One day a man put his arms around me, and
my arms and legs became tree limbs. It turned out I was
the enchanted princess all along,...
because I can no longer feel my feet.
Was it a trick of genetics or a magic potion
that made my fingers into feathers or fins
ready for a different kind of escapade?
My body is slowly giving itself away
from this universe. It...
I find it is much harder to sew
now that one of my arms has become
a giant white wing. It’s nonsense
to assume, of course, a spell gone wrong,
a stepmother’s curse, a swan nearly freed.
I recall being swallowed in...
Photography by Paul Barson
Even here the glimmering simbelmynë grows
in the ghostly pale green meads and haunted hollows
far from the hallows somber in their ordered rows
where our old bones the cold earth slowly swallows.
Of certainty indeed no living person knows
and...
A midwife—she reaches
for the flower’s afterlife and dyes
it with a puddle of St. Germain. We’re dealing
in floral ghosts & flakes of paint
curved over our fingertips,
abalone crescents. I have been
told to chant words of protection—
cornstalk & eucharist. She says
I’ll think...
It’s not that I’m not comfortable
in my own skin. It’s that I can’t
ever be without it—it’s a harness
in a handbag, holding me to the ocean
with a hook and a thread.
This is the life I wanted—a cottage,
no Prince Charming but...