Daughter of the Sea

By Leonora Simonovis

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My great-grandfather 
knew to take what was 

needed. Today his trade 
would be called sustainable. 

Barcelona, my father’s 
hometown, had a fish 

market where head-wrapped 
women sang while cleaning 

and quartering the catch 
of the day. They let scales 

and bones onto a tarp, later
offered them to the Goddess.

I loved those days: buying 
fish, root vegetables, herbs 

for sancocho. I was transported 
to a time and place before my father 

and my father’s father and his father 
before, of men who knew Yemayá’s 

swells and rhythms whose nets fed 
a whole village. Sky aglow, they 

whistled until fish surfaced, the sun’s 
fontanelle crowning the horizon.

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Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, editor and educator, living on unceded Kumeyaay territory, colonially known as San Diego. Her debut poetry collection, Study of the Raft, won the 2021 Colorado Prize for poetry and her work has appeared in DMQ Review, The Hopper, About Place Journal, River Mouth Review, and others. She received fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.

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