and so the tide rises
this is where our poems wiggle their toes, sand caught in the crevices. this is where our creativity lives; this is where we put our money where our mouth is. let us take you to the sea, and enjoy.
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short on time? check out our collection of shell-sized poetry.
content warning: kidnapping, violence, death, blood
Siren
By Jaclyn Hart
The sea in the darkness calls
in the voices of her sisters, lamenting.
Their grief an ocean, and she cries bitter saltwater tears.
The men catch her in a net, first, and drag her out with gnarled, angry fists. One hand is tangled in her hair and more press into the skin of her body, and they carry her easily despite her best efforts.
They drop her when they leave the reach of the water -- drag her onto the beach, through the sand. She gasps for air, nails scrabbling at the iron they put on her wrists, the cloth they gag her with.
They only laugh.
The tide rises; the tide falls.
She lays in the sun, baking; in the moon, she shivers.
Her form had shifted when she’d left the water, left her with two weak legs instead of the power of her tail. At first she’d tried to crawl, tried to stand, but she’d only fallen back into the burning sand.
She can hear the waves, at least. Rising, falling.
She matches her breaths to the rhythm of the waves.
After the first day, they lift her from the sand. Her skin burns from the sun, from their touch, and then they drop her into water.
The comfort is cold, and short-lived.
It’s not her home; it’s a coffin made of glass.
She presses her hands to the glass, can feel the sea on the other side.
She watches the waves roll in, tries to figure time from the way they move. She’s done this more times than she remembers, but never from above the water.
She loses track of the hours she’s spent here. She dreams of the sea, her home — the tide, waves rising and falling, sparking. The light from the moon, shining in the dark.
They have stolen other things, not just her.
They have taken coral and pearls, shells and other things.
The sea is quiet, but when she sees what they have taken, her blood boils hot in her veins.
But she is patient.
She can wait.
Here is something they have forgotten: the sea is older and hungrier than they could ever dream. The sea was alive long before they were ever a thought; the sea will outlast the ones who are not yet a thought even now.
When the sea smiles, it is with the sharp-tooth grin of a predator.
The tide rises, the tide falls.
Birds wheel overhead.
The sea will always protect her children.
They gagged her as soon as she was out of the water; they have kept her silent.
The sea has screamed and raged with her voice, instead.
She can hear the echoes of her sisters in the waves.
And then it falls silent, and she knows: it’s time.
In the night, while they sleep heavy and deep, steeped in their snuffling rough-snore dreams, she bloodies her fists, her feet, on the glass until a spider-web crack forms.
When she smiles, her teeth are bared, and it’s a sharp and hungry thing.
She climbs out of the coffin they made for her, takes unsteady steps on her pins-and-needle feet.
Their loot sits, unguarded, by a flickering fire. She wrinkles her nose at the stink of alcohol that lies heavy on the men, but presses on.
Like ghosts in the sand, her feet leave bloody prints behind her, trailing.
She picks through their hoard with careful fingers; when she finds what she’s looking for, she holds it closer to her chest.
In the moonlight she tips her head back, shakes her hair out, and sends a silent wave of gratitude to the ocean.
They do not wake, at first, but when they do it is all at once. She is brutal with them as they have been with her. She fights them with nails and teeth and her stolen coral knife.
The dawn comes, and when the sky lightens, the sand of the beach is red with their blood.
Her hands, too.
She sits at the edge of the sea, feet in the water. She dips her hands beneath the waves, lets the tide steal the color from her fingertips until the sea itself is a gaping, bleeding wound.
The iron chains lie, broken and useless, next to her, though dark shadows of them linger on her wrists, burned into her skin.
She has broken the chains they put her in.
She has earned her freedom, paid for it with the blood of the ones who put her in iron.
She watches the waves, how they rise and fall, like something wild and breathing.
These men did not believe the sea is a living thing.
They were wrong.
At dawn, she lays the things they’ve stolen at the edge of the water, trusting that the tide will rise, the tide will fall — and so what they have stolen will be returned, taken back by safer hands.
In the dawning light, she hears her sisters’ call thrumming in her veins.
She looks at her hands, stained with blood and cleaned by the tide, and smiles, small and exhausted.
When she slips back under the water, she doesn’t look back.
Jaclyn Hart still believes in magic and possibilities. If she's not writing, she's thinking about the power of stories. She's written many pieces but this is her first published piece. Find her @jfhartwrites on Twitter.
artist's statement
In "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls", two people return to the same stretch of beach after a long absence. While those people and the location are the same, they are not unchanged. I was fascinated with the thought of the sheer possibility and potential of what the ocean has seen that we just don't know about.
Amarachi
By Joseph C. P. Christopher
Her tiny teary eyes
carry a thousand un-worded
stories. Her left arm bears daily
cheerless shooting calvary. Amarachi
-heaven's rain, the lines of my dithyramb are a fragile garden nursing
peaches of shadows and sunlight, as you lay on my laps lifeless like a
broken clock. The world has taken a limb from you in search of the sea. It
has tortured you to gloom. Where
did your laughter go, the one that filled
our cups when father lost his job and
mother swept the streets for a meal?
We survived on infant jiggles and riddles of paradise baked in bean
cakes when we hawked them on metallic trays on our heads, traversing
Terminus Market, beating each other in the heat and light of swift stimuli.
Where is your laughter, the one that
kept warm, cold felted mats,
enwrapped on the floor which never
showed an ounce of mercy as we lay
on it every night, jerking to nick the
fires in our bones? Where is that lovely
sweetness? When hunger claws at
infant bellies, you are the river with
which the soul is joyed. Amarachi -
heaven's blossom, the world has taken
a rib from you in search of the oceans.
You must rise in the wake of this
minstrelsy before, before the birds
catch a wink.
Joseph C.P. Christopher is a poet. He is the author of Salient Whispers (2014) which was shortlisted for ANA/Chevron award for poetry in 2014 and his newest collection is titled Dust in the Rain (2020). He is currently a doctoral candidate with Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. He lives in Abuja.
artist's statement
"Amarachi" is a poem about the poet's kid sister who died in the poet's arms, in a rush to the hospital to save her life from a sudden ailment. It conveys the writer's nostalgic feelings towards his late sister.
Come Over
By Claire Sosienski Smith
sometimes the sweat
leaks off my page
coastbound
end of the line
while this sky-
dragged curfew
keeps us close
Claire Sosienski Smith is based in London and grew up on the south coast of the UK. They spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, prison abolition and Phoebe Bridgers. They tweet @CLAIRESOS.
Daughter of Tides
By Lynn M Knapp
Sea spray of memory, sea of delight,
waves boil to breakers, seething with white.
Wet ringlets flying, I skim over the sand
drawn ever faster in the strength of his hand,
sea spray of memory, sea of delight.
He stumbles unsteady, bent, small and slight,
one eye wide open, the other clamped tight.
He leans on my arm, the better to stand,
bends to my arm, to the strength of my hand,
sea spray of memory, sea of delight.
Dark jut of his jaw, eyes sea-blue alight,
we play in the swells, the ebb of the tide.
In lace-tatted undertow, seaward he stands,
his toes in the surf cleave stripes in the sand,
sea spray of memory, my sea of delight.
Lynn M Knapp is the author of Giving Ground (2017) which celebrates her vibrant central city neighborhood. Her work has also appeared in the Raven Chronicles, the Amsterdam Quarterly, and Poets Reading the News.
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