From

Winter 2017

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I found a bottle at the bottom of the ocean

By Alicia Elkort Jennifer Givhan
From the Winter 2017 Issue

 

Sealed with obsidian & red beryl

I could see a child inside

 

who dazzled the bottle beast &

I was afraid to release her

 

she was everything

her breath became my breath

 

her heart my heart, her voice—

 

I broke the seal & we fell onto the sand

blood and afterbirth a coronation

 

the child now free, inhaled salt and spume

the both of us standing at the ocean’s

 

edge, a tern of froth a wisp of cloud

she took rocks from the ocean

 

& sand from the shore

then drank them like wine

 

& made of that bottle a weapon

 

                  I’ve buried so many things &

when I cannot hold anything more

 

my heart, a dark red bottle,

then breaks the glass of my hands

 

Alicia Elkort

Alicia Elkort’s poetry has been published in AGNI, Arsenic Lobster, Elsewhere Lit, Heron Tree, Menacing Hedge, Rogue Agent, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and many others. She was named a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Book Prize in 2015. She lives in California and will go to great lengths for an honest cup of black tea and a cool breeze.

Jennifer Givhan

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the southwestern desert and the author of three prize-winning poetry collections: Girl with Death Mask (Indiana University Press/Indiana Review’s Blue Light Books, 2017), Protection Spell (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), and Landscape with Headless Mama (Pleiades Press, 2015). Her honors include an NEA fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and the Frost Place Latin@ scholarship, among others, and her work has appeared in publications including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Poetry, Boston Review, AGNI, and Kenyon Review. She is editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and teaches at The Poetry Barn and Western New Mexico University.