SEAL/WOMAN

 

VII. SEAL-WOMAN

this

strange story

the wilder

                          enemy

        at night

height of summer

watching     sea-birds

and seals

in some wild

ocean

the star-lit water

emerald slope                                  magnificent cliffs,

wild        empty

wind

difficult to imagine

our land map

lies somewhere

forming

enemy shores

an immense red

cliff,

seems impossible

the details emerge;

a confusion –

as if

this

empty

beach                                    edge

softened with

flowering maritime plants

receives                           the shore

 

 

VIII. SONG OF THE SEA

I was seized by an ecstasy

trembling

mingling with

sounds of nature –

the figure of a young woman –

She disappeared

in full view

she

stared

she stopped singing

she          vanished

I have given my heart to the sea

 

In the morning I woke

absorbed with               her form

her song

a vivid dream

I could not

remember

 

 

IX. SILENCE

we were

men.

guttural cries of sea-birds             softened

by              our bow

within easy gunshot                    seals

in wonder

extraordinarily tame

my

own heart

this forgotten shore,

beauty of                     the        sea, and       cut

I had always longed

dreamed of in boyhood

a man

in a ruthless war

I had often

searched

drifting

This lonely shore

a      wild creature

an indefinable sadness

edge of the ocean

shadows

in the fissures of         rocks,

I was out of breath.      I threw myself down

purple mist

velvet curtains

edges of         darkening sea                                                   the massive horns

 

 

    I forgot

 

and looking          for signs

 

  I closed my eyes

 

 

 

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Katie Schaag is a multimedia writer and artist making work for the page, stage, gallery, screen, and social context. She is the author of the feminist erasure poetry chapbook The Infinite Woman (Greying Ghost 2021) and the interactive remix/erasure poetry web app The Infinite Woman (Angular 2019). A Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech with an English PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researches plasticity, performativity, digital poetics, queer femme aesthetics, and minoritarian conceptualisms. Her creative writing has been published by Yes Femmes, Sporklet, Oxeye Press, La Vague, Nat. Brut, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Datableed, Requited Journal, Metatron, NightBlock, Imagined Theatres, Vector Press, Guttural, and Word For/Word. She performs and exhibits her artwork in galleries, museums, libraries, and theaters. 

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