Elegy for the Nautilus

by Claire Pinkston

I keep             testing
          my limbs against the sea
and coming up                        with the same
 
          hollow body. before I ask          
for anything I cut away a portion
          of my own tongue              sometimes I feel
 
I have grown           so tightly coiled into deference
          my hands have ceased to be my own.
my grandmother tells me        
 
          I am nothing            without a body. at night I cut
my fingers to the quick, smooth
          and edgeless. say                    surrender.
 
when it is dark enough to speak, she tells me of
          a couple who slept            as a man
in blue warmed a bomb
 
          between his hands       at night, I dream
of pressing myself into every crevice
          of her skin               until
 
we glow brighter than the flash.
          once, I held myself by the
wrists and restarted        my heart
 
          with the same clinical
urgency           my mother jumpstarts
          her car. I am training myself              out
 
of viewing the world               in absolutes
          but when I hold the ocean to my ear
only the sound of our destruction
 
          echoes             back.
as the moon opens its mouth on the sea
          as do I,            ask                  
 
when I am gone                      please
          do not let them            section open my
skull, compound the history within to
 
          sequence. when I am gone, I want
to leave behind                          more 
          than     a          body.

---

Claire Pinkston is a biracial Black youth poet and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has previously been recognized at the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is published or forthcoming in diode poetry journal, Lumiere Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and The Hellebore, among others. She is growing with her poetry.

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