no one writes about lanternfish
Lynn Finger
like they really like lanternfish, who light their own way in a field of shredded shadows. Their wet petal skin uncanny out of water. Why should any of us be out of the water, but it happens. I hear the surface risings that skein above me, scour sky with the sound of timber crack on shore rocks. If I rise to the wave-top the clamor might drown me, but only in the dark do I breathe, grow lanterns from my skin, gills on cheeks. We grow into what we’re used to, how a pine struck by lightning spawns branches crooked & battered by invisible clutching. Land is a construct where we put our nightmares, in the sea we’re uncoiling new coral. One day I will leave, it already feels swallowed. Someone once told me a butterfly will carry me away should I make it to the surface. I look for wing-shaped shadows above the wave-bind the nights I linger. I hover in the curve of a butterfly shadow & twist like a conch shell. Some nights I will the wings to take me up, so I can be tatters, & darkness, & leave the sea to its bitter flesh, an unsolved maze.
Lynn Finger’s poetry has appeared in Ekphrastic Review, 8Poems, Perhappened, Twin Pies, Book of Matches, Drunk Monkeys and is forthcoming in Wrongdoing Magazine. Lynn is an editor at Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Follow Lynn on Twitter @sweetfirefly2.