you dress for work in straight skirt
& paisley blouse. It’s camouflage, like a turtle
buried on the beach, how lost you were, newly left.
As your teen daughter, I determined not to follow you,
wore men’s clothes. Why? Women are weak, get forgotten.
You & I, we spun alone, separate eggs tossed in ocean tides.
When we were sea turtles doesn’t sound as pretty
as when we were sparrows, but turtles have no vocal chords
& in that tract house set on sand & termites, it fit: we burst
out of egg casings, unable to talk. The new world
with no instructions. Where was the ocean.
Your denial was as seamless as the leathery eggs:
If we tried to say we loved each other, we groaned
& screamed, big sounds from the archelon carapaces
we hid in, or dove deep to the ocean floor, benthic.
Years & years later we did say it, despite all, at a holiday event
where rum made emotions flow, but still I was glad we both fled
after, as our strangely hinged togetherness could have sent
us back into a hiding in our nests buried in the beach.
Then who knows if we would emerge under the moon, or
maybe be unfound, not knowing differently.
Lynn Finger’s (she/her) poetry has appeared in Ekphrastic Review, 8Poems, Perhappened, Twin Pies, Kissing Dynamite, Book of Matches and Drunk Monkeys. Lynn is an editor at Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Follow Lynn on Twitter @sweetfirefly2.
RESURRECTION mag 