by PHOEBE REEVES

I will go to the beach and touch my toes to the Atlantic.
I will become the goddess of bougainvillea,

fingernails raising the gooseflesh on every man I run
my hands over as I pass them by.
under a trellis of night-blooming jasmine,

and the flowers’ voices both opening
out of our pale throats as the moon rises.

magical, timeless,
taxes, or indigestion.
whose motion I cannot decipher from where I stand.

I will lay under a bier of white roses and float
out to sea,

into pure salt—
a block of perfume and bitterness.
that recedes and never returns.
sung by a whale in its deep loneliness where no answer

will ever come,

a hand that has never touched another’s face
in tenderness.
I will go out and never come back,
my voice and hips passing into the unadulterated
antihistory of the ocean

my memories and my fingerprints become seaweed
and salt water
and my lips turn into one last
blossom from the shore,

the horizon,
like a half-remembered line of a lost song.

Ω

Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and now is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has three chapbooks of poetry, and a full-length collection, Helen of Bikini (Lily Poetry Review). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, Grist, Forklift OH, and The Chattahoochee Review. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband Don Peteroy, amidst her unruly urban garden.

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