A Song of Salt (Poem)

Sing a song of salt.

How mothers leave daughters to swells and currents. To drown.

Lay down a melody, a sea song, sung to salt.

In dark places where mothers abandon their blood to currents and swells. Their daughters sink.

These drowning girls.

Beneath black water, a transformation, where they learn to swim without breaking white water above them, as creatures made by the sea.

As tongues are pulled and fashioned into gills, and feet, lacerated by blue sea glass, bleed into fins, and hair, matted green, grows like seaweed, tendrils to pull you down, down, to the dark.

To this bower of Stygian water where memories are drowned like sailors, wrested beneath cold, cold waves, by mermaids, who need lovers,

a briny graveyard of suffocated hearts.

But tears don't matter when you're made of salt water,

and big smiles,

and teeth,

sharp teeth,

so many teeth.

bvk, 2020.