☀ Today's Poem: Two poems by Julia Bouwsma

Dear ghosts, how can we stop the sunlight spinning the story

from our hands? The boards were pried off one by one, but the threat of fire
will linger under anyone's tongue. Who doesn't carry their own erasures
silently in their spines, limbs horizoned to the past? My old dog shreds
herself a nest in the old quilt, and I Franken-stitch it back up, stumble
the knot. If placed in a room together, you would not recognize the ones
you have become, nor would they recognize you. Too often the poem's fingers
are clumsy with distance, grief the long thread I fail again to tie.
Would it matter if I told you of my own ancestors? Bodies packed
in cattle cars, bodies prodded into dividing lines, the gloved hands that choose
another's fate. Goose-flesh skin surrendered to the clutch of shower tiles,
the final dark release of their bodies coiled into air. All I know is this:
even before I was born I breathed a loss not my own.

Sucker Fish

Lizzie Marks

My baby was a sucker fish right from the start: a fat slap and slurp, a thrash
in the net of my belly (and how thin, how patched the net) that summer
I stumbled so full of him each morning down to the shore, nausea a thundercloud
about to split as I heaved into the ocean, jacksmelts gathering to bite my toes,
puked last night's potato scraps into the sea drooling, lifted my skirts
not caring who could see and thought to myself, Lizzie you've got yourself a sucker fish
inside of you—he'll eat you whole if it's the only way out. Thick foot hard in the gut,
and I thought, He's a fighter sure as dawn. And how happy I was then, knowing
my baby would fight, even with a hook in his gape-hungry jaws. Yes, and he came
out like that too, flopping and red, latched straight on with his fleshy lips—
till that day they drove us from our house, loaded us into the boats, the carriage,
steered us into the bleach cold hall said, Women go left men go right. Then I knew the line
was about to snap. A pair of white hands plucked him off my breast. I sagged down
torn, unfurled, gill-slit. And my sweet William he just puckered his mouth.