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| by Sara Aultman |
brackish water stains your mouth, salt cuts old wounds
never quite healed right on that whiplash tongue,
.
you’re speaking to the tidal choir and the midnight sky feels velvet.
how many colors of your name must die for a baptism to take?
not but three mornings past and the glassy waves bore another you,
lungless, waterlogged, lilac-bright as early dawn. the burial was soft.
whose words swim aquatic behind your teeth,
if every shade you shine floats back to shore
and still you testify, a holiness, holiness
open throat for the congregation
scream the faith you need, that one day you’ll see
in the coastal mirror as it ebbs your wet ankles,
the rose-heat complexion of something alive
and something
still breathing.
MEET THE POET:
.SARA AULTMAN is a Seattle-based writer of liminal and arcane things who can be found on Twitter @TheSaraAult. Sara's writing is featured in Olney Magazine, Small Leaf Press, Fahmidan Journal, and HAD with more forthcoming in HELL IS REAL: A Midwestern Gothic Anthology.
