For nine months leading to the publication of Deep Salt Water, the feminist journal Room featured a collaborative treatment of the book: my writing was interspersed with collages by Catherine Mellinger, and photographed by macro-photographer Melanie Gordon; my voice was recorded by Paul Swoger-Ruston, who created subtle musical compositions based on the sounds he captured. The result is a beautiful swirl of language, music, colour, and form.
Month One
I was twenty-three when my pearl was formed. He hadn’t yet kissed me; I already knew. I’m stubborn and willful. My mother repeatedly called me a “misery.” She wasn’t wrong: I was never meant to be a child. Continue reading…
Month Two
I don’t love the mermaid, or even the man with the laughing gas. The love flows through, but it won’t last: it’s manufactured, little pill. Like psychedelic phytoplankton, coral reefs and Leary’s brain. I love the man who stands and observes. We met in the starlight when planets were forming. I will not meet him until tomorrow. We’ll make a child who won’t be born. I’ve never come to terms for this. Not yet. You’ll see. Continue reading…
Month Three
“I’ll swim to China!” you would’ve said. You’d point to the sea and kick your legs. “Whatever you want,” he would’ve replied. And he would’ve meant it.
He’s fierce that way. He’s loyal. I killed him. Continue reading…
Month Four
They hovered in white gowns and white sheets, a wonderland of ghostly fluorescence. Suspended from movement and animation. I’m gliding in, a succulent weakness, to take my place among the listless. I don’t quite belong; it’s an obvious gap, but I’m not sure why. “Are they okay?” I ask the nurse. He nods: “They’re recovering.” Continue reading…
Month Five
The melting of glaciers is causing the level of oceans to rise.
Islands are vanishing.
‘Dis-appearance’—as a concept—is elusive.
We’ll often concoct an array of stories.
But ‘gone-ness’ is hard for the mind to conceive. Continue reading…
Month Six
You come to shore: an awkward boy who’d lived in a whale, who’d learned life’s themes before it was natural.
You are an oddity.
I am uneven.
You ride above, along this song you now understand. I’m watching your breathing, your body above me. Continue reading…
Month Seven
In my analogy, waves of time could come together: intersect and cause a spike. An augmentation, rising toward a plane of perception that I couldn’t reach without you. But you cried this morning, recalling a miscarriage. Twins, you told me. I hadn’t known. I’d never seen you cry before. Continue the thought. In my analogy, waves of time could cancel each other. Arcs, in contact, suddenly flatline: an ugly, immediate, nullification. As if each history never happened. “Babe?” I say. You don’t respond. You’re lost in the music. Nice and flow: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. Continue reading…
Month Eight
I citrus the orange. It sounds so small. As small as a thumbnail. I’d like three degrees in the middle of winter. The human mind is bleached like coral: brainwash, Clorox, bright so bright against tanned skin. But three degrees is a seismic wave, the kind that glides so smooth in the ocean. It’s imperceptible out at sea. It could be here now; we’d never know, except we do. Continue reading…
Month Nine
Abortion exists in a realm I call ‘spirit.’ I can’t hold this concept inside my brain. In my womb: then I could, like the hint of a secret whose words I can’t know. Only whispers and tingling, like breath on the nape. Like the promise of more. I believe this sensation.
Refracted through the lens of sin, we quickly reach abyssal blue. But light, in the deep, is a radiant body whose warmth fills my veins and my mouth with its song. Luminesce in this lightness: I don’t seek forgiveness. I seek, instead, to bear the burden of my awareness. Continue reading…