Why bother bending utensils when you can bend minds, bend limbs, bend roads?  We pulse from city to city, light streaks even a map can’t catch.  Sammich sustenance absorbed in rest stops with carelessly locked bathrooms and landscaped-area flowers flaking color into the absence of light.  At least the sprinkler timers are working.

The visitors from the Continent stitch the air in my car with vexation over how to locate themselves in/on Google while I creep streets striated in freezing precipitation in the hopes of a spot.  Their kindly obliviousness and the night can’t be wrapped up and slammed into an umbrella stand soon enough.  I am a chorus of rubberized responses desperate not to get sick, but the crud catches me three days after my friend hacks without mercy from the passenger’s seat.  She also likes to chew with her mouth open.

I sizzle with incredulity and cast off body parts in anguish and still there are friends who draw their pedestrian problems on what skin I have left.  Segments of me catch fire and they abandon their markers and crayons for hammers and chisels and X-Acto knives.  I am reduced from broken human to a hunk of charred, stale birthday cake decorated with needy petroglyphs and no one around me knows the purpose or definition of water.

I have the audacity to learn every contour and nuance of the Pacific where it crashes into land, but my cartography is all sloppy sentiment.  I cannot render it to lines, arcs, and angles, but when/if you are ready, I can beam it to the arches and viaducts in you that carry empathy.  Do you have those?  I have been looking for you my entire life.

In water, we are one.  Great forests of kelp tune in to our nervous systems, then become them, leathery blades buzzing and afire with impulses.  Schools of hammerheads glide between synapses.  Legs aspire to lengths that equal depths in the Mariana Trench, but dangling will have to do.  Love is a manta ray on a silent mission to join its cousins and we know how to flow with it. 

I’ll never have to say this, but bury me at sea.

– Karen Lozinski

Author’s Note: When it comes to my writing, there are times poetry is the body of water just below the excitement where ache and beauty converge and I plunge into it with all the fervor and feelings that have possessed me to eventually emerge, back in everyday life, soaked in and exhilarated by language. That body of water can be the vastness of the Pacific, the insistent coalescence of pulsing, contradictory currents of the Mississippi, or the familiar tumult of the Atlantic (I have deliberately chosen water I have lived near or do now). It can be a puddle of specious origin, a sparkling, deep blue infinity pool, or my own claw foot bathtub.