by Maureen Seaton

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 twenty poetry collections, both solo and collaborative, most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019) and Fisher (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her awards include the Iowa Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), also garnered a “Lammy” and was recently reprinted in paperback (2018). ). With poet Neil de la Flor, she edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton teaches at the University of Miami.