Go for a dip in the honeyed bay, drink the creaturely smells of sea. Float through winged kelp, bladderwrack, the foam of once- live matter. The body undone, the skin porous. Imagine, then, your surprise at the sudden slip shape that swims beside, sleeker than a dog, too quick for a good look. Just the feel of heft, muscular. Dark head and silken form bobbing on the animal edge—how close this animal edge. Brute. Marvelous. You keep swimming, vowing for it not to be more than this. Not to become a metaphor for something else, like a woman entering a vast new country by the skin of her clenched teeth. Let it just be this: the body, buoyed by waves. The gasp. Your held breath.
Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems have been published in Ninth Letter, Frontier Poetry, Longleaf Review, AAWW's The Margins, Kweli, Lumiere Review, The Hellebore, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is currently a President's Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University. An alumna of Tin House Workshops and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, she serves as a reader for Tinderbox Poetry.
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