SEAWORLD
BY BRYNNE REBELE-HENRY
Homeschooled, ’17
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors’ List
Your aquarium withers when her fin emerges
Bloody shored and afterbirth: slick
That dishwater embryo
Your dahlia yellow skin too skinny and stitched
Butterfly mouth
You scatter it thorned and brambled and darkening blue
The swim is a marked up reckoning
You come away in petals of fleshmottled bloom
The water will catch at your ankles
While you drink from the belly of an iguana until
You are barrenmouthed and barely floating
The sea took/lapped at the salted skin/mistook me for another fish
It is mine/it is September and the water is cold and scorches against me
It was summer/it was beautiful/the air tasted like grease and thighs
It was mine to lick/I sucked on the teat til it grew sour
It was cold/it was winter/it tasted like wine and stung open my eyes
We are gray and bored and I say let us go swimming/let us get drunk on too clean air
There is a ruler/there is a boy with a goldfish in his skull and he says: Come
I have a tape measure with which to open the ocean
I have a kingdom, an orange blossom and an old prawn crown
And a wisdom tooth from the first baby born without eyes
And I have brought them here today
For this very/this specific/this perfect/this purpose is simple and aquatic
I say praise my spine and my hands and the places I am being slit open
With a pocketknife found inside a softshell crab and the places
Your tongue has not yet severed from my grasp
And my seaweed and my murked up caress
You come to my thighs and I call you a scepter
You want to learn how to sea floor spread
We break beer bottles and call them oysters
Lick out the pulp and the day
I puncture her fin with my teeth and say: Suck
I eat three sea shells and they cut my tongue
I say this is my afterlife/my reckoning/spread me open and you’ll find a pearl
I say this is my hallelujah/open my mouth and pull out a starfish
It touches our bowed ankles and we say ride
It breaks open a whiskey bottle and we lap at its rough
If I push you down we will submerge
We will become sand, our thighs will be four pillar
I was the first baby born without a navel
A crater for an eye
I bathed in my organs and called it warm
I opened my nostrils up with milk
I ate fire and glass shards and convulsed
I said take me to Seaworld
I said feed me gasoline and watch me convolute
I said manatee in my mouth
I said I licked open the bottom dwellers
There is a boy underneath a submarine
He holds three pearls and an old beer can with which to educate you
On the ways of the underground down-low zebra-striped fish Straddle a large fish
Cut off an organ and whisper your prayer
Wait an hour and one day and a year
Ferment the blood and watch it hiss
Writhe on the back of a sand dollar lay
And say look at me and my moon crater white
Find a girl with wings in her eyes and ask her to hold you down
You will whip/you will be seagrass/you will open your mouth and cerulean bubble
You will touch her until her scales fall open and into your waiting sugar mouth
You will rust
You will become sand
You will chafe at her thighs until she lets you in
You will say I have been waiting
You will pierce your mouth with a hook
You will open your tongue and her tongue
And inside you both keep daggers of abalone and wet
Keep a bird you carved from coral
Keep a platinum dart/a will to forget
Eat the prickle/eat the sand you will purge You will clean/you will singe with a scar
And an off-white chalice
Keep a girl made out of fishing hooks
And a claw
And a shark and a glistening pool table that reminds you of sick
And her punctured sex
It is Monday/it is dark/you say take a bracken and slit me up
It is cold/we are moving our teeth over stone/gnash and hiss
Writhe me open and gnaw, I say
It is Sunday/it is warm/it is Easter
I eat three rubies and try to grow a tail
You say ligament
You say slit
You say open up
You say sharks like blood and calcite fish
In my tongue/in my opening
I say there is a pearl/and a girl/and another girl/and two hands/and a tail I say I am a sea snake/I can detach/I have no ligaments/I am yours
Underneath his belly we find tin cans, a dart, and a man with a glass for an eye
And we take him
And we eat him up
And we find our ovaries and turn them into monsters/into fish
Put them in a bowl next to a wooden hand and a peg
We have a scepter we made out of tin cans
And a fishing rod and a drowned man’s foot
When I was born I sucked out the sinew of manatees
I said I have a proclivity for salt
I rubbed my teeth over the scales and cried out
I found sea glass and made it my tail
I made a whip out of seaweed and said look at me
I ate a gallon of sand and it was bitter
I opened up the gates of seaworld/I was a shark/I knew how to sink
We found a dead bird and called it mother
We gnashed at the foam and said wait for the hiss
We slit sand dollars up our thighs I found a ship and I found a girl
Her mouth is a chalice
Inside she keeps five dollars and a handful of mollusks
TRANSATLANTIC
BY BRYNNE REBELE-HENRY
Homeschooled, ’17
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors’ List
My bones are made of gold dust and tapioca starch We’ve
been mapping the gray with our red-worn fingers Printing
out the bloody maps and tacking them to the walls They
came looking for nubs of sheen
They came looking for pearls and loose dresses
Automobiles are really small boats
Gasoline skin, I said burn me like the ocean
They doused me like a wick and I walked into church
When my chest opened the yellow dust covered me like a Sunday
The metal found my belly and I tasted bitter
I will rise, I will be an autumn-haired phoenix
We will open our bodies with silver planets and wait for our ports to go verde
And I will cover my black teeth with petrol roses and fennel seeds
