notdeermag
Never Turn Your Back, Leigh Camacho Rourks
There is a king tide, and the Pacific Ocean
is an alien beast tonight, a gorgeous monster
god,
so different than my beloved Atlantic.
And it is howling. Goodamn it can howl, a noise
like a tornado, a train, the moon or the earth or your
last breath straining, being wrenched and ripped in two,
and yet, I am seduced.
My heart has promised it
a sacrifice: this body it rides, if you can believe, as if
the two have come disconnected, and the heart is no
longer willing,
as if my heart could beat its way out and toss
the rest of me to something bigger, something
so big it is hungry, so big we must feed it. Something
we all owe.
It only wants to sink like a whalefall, my heart,
to fall apart, to unflesh, to debone, to fling
itself into life or death or any damn thing, so long
as it is motion. It does not care for teeth or limbs
just the way ocean rushes like blood
ventricular, bathing in salt and violence, this
is the stuff.
The rest of me can rot and tide away,
but it will dance.
This heart has a thing for pulsing,
for waves that crash and pound and tear and rend.
It has a weakness for gods with tridents and for sirens
and for men that fall deep to their deaths in search
of goddamn song.
This heart is a swimmer, a thing with
not wings but fins. It is pre-limb. It is fetal flesh
that floats. It is more comfortable in the primordial
than I/always careful/always scared/am.
Leigh Camacho Rourks is a Cuban-American author from South Louisiana and Assistant Professor at Beacon College in Florida. Her collection, Moon Trees and Other Orphans, won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is also the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize.