Me and The Salt

When you go to the aquarium, the staff teach you how to pet fish.

Fish must be touched with two fingers and gently stroked. The fish are

scared, but are open to being touched. Sometimes people would roughly

poke at the fish, not caring about the two finger rule. I also ignored the

two finger rule; grazing the fish using one finger.

I thought the fish were fine with me petting them with my index alone.

But imagine,

feeling one finger when you were expecting two.

~

The whale one, her favorite story.

I enjoyed watching her talk, watching her turn old.

She told me she loved Moby Dick and Asian girls.

~

At night, she burned kerosene

to keep us from being in the dark,

outlined by how our bodies swam around each other.

She rubbed her hands against mine

and I thought how can anyone be afraid of this?

Her nose moved against my zones of skin and attachment.

I began to feel my eel egg heart squirming and hatching itself,

under the pressure of her fist, opening and closing inside of me.

~

I believe in what I fail at

and this time, it was my own pedagogy,

my dedication to the love plot.

I craved wanton wantedness, the selfish memory of sex, her face smoothing

the surface of mine.

Now, I want different language, honest language.

~

Violence and intimacy always coexist there is this feeling spectrum.

In the middle is fantasy

I don’t know what she was thinking when she raped me.

I was thinking that love is magic—

it is the ointment and the cause.

~

My little ritual of

mopping my pubic hairs off her tongue.

No one likes hair in their mouth

and it is embarrassing how wiry my hair is.

My vagina sore, swollen, and red,

I would turn away from her

and hate myself.

Rape is tiring.

Queer rape is alienating.

Maybe I am lucky

I can drift alone on top of the ship planks,

waiting for someone to find me

and yell “Marisa!

Is that you? Marisa!

How long have you been out here?”

Until that happens, it is me

and the salt pouring itself over

my bodily autonomy.

No one asking how

the ship sank.

~

The sea gifts its little bones on the edges of its sweaty knees. I always

took them home and put them in my seashell box, to remember the

ocean and its body.

Rape was a seashell placed by my feet. I took it because that is what one

does, when given something. I bit into the seashell, cracking my jaw, my

tongue a blood seal. I was searching for the tiny grains of sand between

my teeth, hearing them rub together. Only I can hear the crunch of time,

the pebbled touch of loss.