mariposa
BY RACHEL INEZ MARSHALL
I wasn’t born. I was found.
In the thick of red tide, my mother
pushed me through lines
of dead silver fish,
sharks, and octopi
that rose in whispers
off moon-splashed coquina.
She rolled me into a tight cocoon
and hung me
on the ceiling
of a Christian family’s beach house.
Mira, vete a ser mariposa ya,
she told me,
then crawled back
into the ocean, and the waves stayed
a shade of Georgia clay
until someone
cut me down.
My new family hummed
of spinnerbait, honey and Magnolia,
chamomile calm
against a sunburn,
and gave me rabbit after rabbit,
which covered the backyard
in a coat of twitching snow.
One burst
into feathers the moment I
held it close. A storm surge
broke, foamed at the dunes, and though
the polite ones looked away,
women in their lawn chairs eyed me
from their driveways—I was
a sad breeze veiled
in seagrass. I dreamed
of the edges of a map
riddled with arrows—
my nameless place,
my unknown sea,
the wreckage that hides in me.
Rachel Inez Marshall’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Mississippi Review, Quarterly West, and the Normal School. She received her MFA in Poetry from Florida State University and currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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