They said I drowned,
but the truth is softer:
I laid myself down like an offering.

I spit river into their open mouths.
I bit the lilies in half.

Silk turned cathedral.
I let my dress balloon with river light.

The earth had nowhere else for me.

If you pressed your ear to the surface,
you would have heard me humming.
They didn’t write that part.

When they pulled me out,
I still had violets in my teeth.
I still had the nerve to look alive.

If ruin was the crown they gave me,
I wore it dripping.
I wore it bright.

You think you know the story:
girl, river, grief.

But the water was warm that day.
The sky was a soft ache.
I was tired of carrying everyone else’s ending.

So I wrote my own.

Not drowned.
Not tragic.
Not accepting their ending.

Why forgive,
yet never forgiven?
Guilty—but my mistakes
Burn like oranges in my scent,


No reversal fate to heal
In yin and yang entangled ,
Only  closing eye
and stillness—
all sea turned dry

When I wake up,
it is void.
Then the room
unfolds around me –
a cold stroke of reality.
It brushes my skin,
crawling up my legs,
slowly warming as it spreads.
A hand, unseen,
caresses reality
into my chest.
It straddles me,
then softly grips my neck.
The pulse in my ears – slow –
becomes the drums of war,
calling a name:

Ishtar.

It’s time.
Breathe for me,
sweat for me.
Let the footsteps
of your fight
feed the ground.
Soak it in my will –
become my altar.
Your sword
bears my truth.
Crescent moons –
my mark –
cover your back.
Eight-pointed stars –
my sign –
won’t leave you in the dark.

She left Reno
in a satin slip
the color of hot coins
pouring from slots,
wearing chewed-up tennis shoes,
mirrors multiplying her,
the marquee burning out
letter by letter,
a hush pressed between her teeth
as if saving the last note.

I followed,
a gangly shadow,
mother’s voice in my ear:
life is not a freeway exit.
But she was the exit.
She drove west
through a glittering throat.

In Tonopah she was a waitress
with red stains on her wrists,
the sleeves tugged low,
coffee pouring thin as blood.
In Barstow she was a sun-bleached Madonna,
halo blistered, mouth lit in stained glass.
At a gas station in Needles
she shimmered into a coyote’s shadow
and slipped behind the pumps.
Everywhere,
a new disguise,
a flicker at the edge of vision.
Not the whole leap,
just rehearsal.

Casinos blinked like electric relics.
Truckers called her sugar,
greedy hands counting her ribs
as if she were a paycheck
sweating in their fist,
but she slipped away each time,
her silhouette already moulting-
a serpent skin, a smoke-trail,
a saint’s shadow burning off the wall.

By Malibu the night
had softened to velvet.
The pier at Zuma
leaned into the Pacific
like a broken rib.

She sang once-
low, cracked, unfinished-
and the slip fell from her
like the last lie.
Her body cut into the dark tide,
this time there was no disguise.

I waded in after her,
ankles bruised by rock.
The sea lit with jellyfish,
not lanterns but wires,
each pulse a warning,
each glow a wound.

Standing at the highway’s end-
no exit left,
just the Pacific’s mouth
closing around her.

Middle age is a drawer of bottles,
labels rubbed blank,
small tablets stamped
with numbers I can’t read,
others chalk-white,
anonymous as bones.

That August night I woke,
a moth in the moonlight,
wings two halves of a Viking ship.
They say if it maps all four corners
you’re finished.
My head bricked with mucus,
her throat raw-
our marriage a duet
two instruments coughing through the score.

I whispered- moth,
as her eyes opened, glowing like sunken lanterns.
It weighed two thousand pounds,
wings lifting her hair
like a bride of the dead.

Two optimism pills
waited on my table.
I chewed them dry,
chalk cementing my tongue,
the insect’s brain ticking in my skull
like a clock in a gothic castle.

Then water rose inside us-
first a seep, then a tide,
spilling warm rivers across the floorboards.
The dark room brightened green,
cypress arms cracked plaster,
reeds whispered spells older than fever.

Fireflies stitched lanterns along the walls,
crocodiles slid through like priests of the river.
We held hands as the bed turned pirogue,
drifting through brackwater green.

Above us the moth circled-
no longer omen but guide,
its wings stirring moonlight into spell.
Papa Legba opened the crossing,
Maman Brigitte lit the reeds with flame.
We: two elders slipping from sickness into swamp,
breath turned to whirlpools,
our oaths ferried
on the moth’s traité tide.

Great murky tides so viciously flailed,
Clawing and gnawing at the grey rugged shore,
Washing up remnants of an ill-fated sail,
The coastline now littered with ruin and gore.

Bloated dead mariners scattered about,
Their ribcages open and nested by gulls,
Pecking at entrails as blood gently spouts,
Staining with crimson the ship's shattered hull.

The billows shall swallow the barnacled bones,
Crushing them into Poseidon's cursed sand,
Creating new coastlines in foggy unknowns,
Waiting for other doomed sailors to land.

A Stepmother’s voice cuts
through the campground:
Who left the cooler open?
Who moved the ******* cushions?
Her words snap the branches.

My father, just arrived,
hat wet with sweat,
stooped to tie the boat off at a tree,
met at once by her complaints,
her tally of our failures.

Her glare pressed hot against my back.
I climbed the pine,
legs scraping bark,
eyes fixed on the shimmer below-
anywhere but here.

She was there:
elbow on the water’s skin,
hair spread like wet silk,
eyes pouring over me.
Come with me, she said.

Where?

Down there.
She smiled, copper arm pointing to the deep.
It’s warm.
The fish brush your skin.

I remembered: sirens don’t save you.
They keep you.

She dove,
silver tearing water’s face,
and the lake closed like a locked door.

When she rose,
her shoulders gleamed like knives.
Laughter rolled toward me,
the same heat as the shore,
only sweeter.

Your turn.

I leapt.
The lake’s mouth closed over me.
Green-gold everywhere.
Her hair against my cheek.
Her tail’s slow beckoning.

I followed
until the light shattered above.
I almost stayed-
not to drown,
but to live where the voices could not reach.