Wreccum Maris
I used to watch you scrub your hands
search the beds and edges of your nails
until the cushions of your fingers
resembled oyster shells
early summer mornings we’d watch
the beachcombers along the Rockaways
per English law what the sea spits out
goes to the crown absent an obvious owner
here in New York it’s finders keepers
in Queens mamá taught me
about riptides and jellyfish
you talked to the old men
in Florida you hate the heat the salt the sand
the water people who don’t speak Spanish
the bugs are all recalcitrant the birds are loud
the day that mamá died I saw you wash your hands
at eighty-one your nails are still like rose quartz
hers were aged ivory
you stared at me your wrangled daughter of the ocean
no longer clam or glass
drowned away from mamá’s shore
I spit you out
I spit you out
I spit you out
search the beds and edges of your nails
until the cushions of your fingers
resembled oyster shells
early summer mornings we’d watch
the beachcombers along the Rockaways
per English law what the sea spits out
goes to the crown absent an obvious owner
here in New York it’s finders keepers
in Queens mamá taught me
about riptides and jellyfish
you talked to the old men
in Florida you hate the heat the salt the sand
the water people who don’t speak Spanish
the bugs are all recalcitrant the birds are loud
the day that mamá died I saw you wash your hands
at eighty-one your nails are still like rose quartz
hers were aged ivory
you stared at me your wrangled daughter of the ocean
no longer clam or glass
drowned away from mamá’s shore
I spit you out
I spit you out
I spit you out
September / October, 2022
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, Rattle, RHINO, Diode, Nashville Review, The Night Heron Barks, On the Seawall, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura serves as a member of the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival's Poetry Advisory Committee.
Art: Madge Evers. Zyg. Mushroom spores on paper,