Among Us, Divine by Maureen Seaton

SWWIM Every Day

I parted my own sea and you came to me: sort of unscripted, sort of splendid. 

A loose bolt in the imagination—the very one that got me in trouble sipping 


lilac wine (stolen from you five minutes ago). Remember? You were breaking 

in your ukulele. All those tiny hand movements. I glued myself into a collage 


and you flew. There was something old school about us. Or scientifically 

unsound. We made faces at Czars. My eyes were browning then, and yours 


were shaped like starfish. You never know who you’ll run into as you sweep 

the sea with a slender stalk. I’ve carried my life inside me for so long now, 

never knowing where it would take me, so irretrievable, so stark raving mine.

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Maureen Seaton has authored nineteen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (with Denise Duhamel, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). A new solo collection, Fisher, is due out from Black Lawrence Press in February, 2018. Seaton teaches creative writing at the University of Miami, Florida.

Poem in Which I Forget Whether I Wanted Anything Else Back Then

SWWIM Every Day

You said you wanted no more than this

thin black dog draped over our feet

propped heel to heel and thigh to thigh

 

and fingers curved around a white mug

in whose coffee lilts a sweeter version

of the milky way bridging dream and dawn

 

and questions about the prayer mountain

I climbed as the daughter of strangers

made of incense and stones and returning

 

with nothing but the memory

of finding footholds in the musky earth

of a mountainside

 

without you & before us or the dog

who now lifts a red-lidded eye

as vast as stars just starting to spin.

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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, The New York Times, and more. She serves on the advisory board for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and is a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. See www.marcicalabretta.com.