Merie Kirby
The selkie refuses to look at the sea
She already knows all its stories, the forms
it takes, how between moments it changes
from grey-blue to that icy green
she painted her kitchen last spring.
She spent the last year swimming
in pandemic seas, her house as much a safe
skin as the seal suit ever was. Striking out on first legs
as thrillingly terrifying as a first trip into
a restaurant with a naked face.
Years ago she moved inland, promising
it was only for a few years.
You know this story.
Sometimes she flies back to visit, tears
like grains of sand scraping her throat
as they climb to her eyes, pit of her stomach
always washing back out to sea with the waves.
The waves hurt the most, the way they can
change, reject each shape as insufficient for the next
moment, no regret, no hope, no gaming the future
in search of big happiness.
Once she lived there. Once she too
whispered the present, the present, the present.
The selkie considers what to pack
Coming ashore she brought only her skin and all
it could hold. She would not call it light. This life
on land is a life of collection, a life spent placing things
on shelves and in boxes. Tidy containment. Nothing
drifting free, no tendrils of seaweed moved by currents
to wrap an unsuspecting leg. Or so she thought.
I keep thinking about all my mistakes, the old man said.
I have to get all that shit in little boxes so I can forget.
An ocean of memory and no container watertight.
When she drove towards the center of the continent,
the truck bed packed tight with boxes, she saw
the wind moving long grasses in green billows.
Merie Kirby grew up in California, between the beach and the Eastern Sierras. She now lives in Grand Forks, ND and teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have been published in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, The Orange Blossom Review, Strange Horizons, FERAL, and other journals. She also writes opera libretti and art songs in collaboration with composers. You can find her hanging out with her family, reading, writing, playing board games, and watching sci-fi movies. She’s online at www.meriekirby.com.
