when you are from an island you become an island
the shore                        the tide                       the eyes
between bottled ships always
adrift & keen                 like a blue flame

you       a territory resting in a basin
your body          that corridor

water so low you could walk
on the backs of urchins

up the narrow stairs of solitude

where the dust holds traces
of orange fire skies

sea salt
chambray
nectar
& flame

past the bare ledge

& into a poppy
superbloom          sweating
out the lonely

it was meant to look like this
flamingo pink sunsets
the mangrove mud squirming into the bay
the fiddler crabs finally scuttling out into the heat

the eye of god comes down like a comet
& everything seems normal in the country
of writhing invocations

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Wenmimareba Collins Klobah (she/they) is an artist, performer, writer, and cultural critic from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received her MFA in poetry from the California College of the Arts, and is currently based in Oregon where she works as an educator. She is passionate about bookmaking, lyrical and concrete poetry, regional linguistics, speculative reimagination, and ecopoetics. Her poems have recently appeared in Foglifter, Samovar, La piel del arrecife, Honey Literary Journal, and Akéwi Magazine. Read more here and @WK_Collins.

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