9.6 / June 2014

Deniz

This part of life should get to be longer. You should come with a disclaimer. Anything you say or do may be used against you in a poem. Another trick to being alone. Avoid mirrors. You’re forgetting what sorrow sounds like in the dark. How to season fish. Taste the salt away on fingers. Reward yourself. Get down on your knees and eat. Forgive yourself with a real poem.

*

We crashed off a bridge in my sleep that summer you bit into an orange in order to peel it and felt embarrassed when our friends laughed out of slight disgust. We learned trades with our hands but there on that bridge we were cultured on the existence of our teeth. Mines grit yours broke. It is rumored nature itself designed the first bridges. Resembling how we made our first bound into a hospital room with an open window. Nature itself spitting lava in my face.

*

Am I talking about the sun? The sun is on the list of things I make myself I tell myself. I am nothing without. Still, no. I think this is about waves. I think it started with a dream. I was in the air, still. I think it started with my mother crying while she spoke. I heard the ocean in her mouth. I think it ended with a sales associate named Deniz, meaning ‘sea’ in Turkish.


Shauna Barbosa lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, the Minnesota Review, A Bad Penny Review, Sundog Lit, and Metazen. When not writing full poems, Shauna’s writing looming half poems somewhere on the Internet. Or event planning. She can be found at http://shaunabarbosa.com.
9.6 / June 2014

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