Daughter of the Sea

My great-grandfather
knew to take what was

needed. Today his trade
would be called sustainable.

Barcelona, my father’s
hometown, had a fish

market where head-wrapped
women sang while cleaning

and quartering the catch
of the day. They let scales

and bones onto a tarp, later
offered them to the Goddess.

I loved those days: buying
fish, root vegetables, herbs

for sancocho. I was transported
to a time and place before my father

and my father’s father and his father
before, of men who knew Yemayá’s

swells and rhythms whose nets fed
a whole village. Sky aglow, they

whistled until fish surfaced, the sun’s
fontanelle crowning the horizon.

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Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, editor and educator, living on unceded Kumeyaay territory, colonially known as San Diego. Her debut poetry collection, Study of the Raft, won the 2021 Colorado Prize for poetry and her work has appeared in DMQ Review, The Hopper, About Place Journal, River Mouth Review, and others. She received fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.