juliette givhan
I don’t know if one is more Scylla
than Charybdis,
but my sisters are fighting
& this time it’s serious.
My body
the boat
ballast heavy & sun browned,
struggles to sail straight—
carve a path dead center,
avoid their fallout.
My body
the boat
sucked down—
funneled to ocean floor to break,
flood, rend apart, gasp back up,
dashed to the shore
in pieces
.
My body
in remnants,
dragged up the rock —
scraped, devoured,
shredded against the bones
of gulls & a history
words that only bridge the strait between them
by carving first into me.
***
Juliette Givhan is a Black poet who writes about myths and memes. Her work appears in ANMLY Magazine, Change Seven Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly, with forthcoming poems in Pidgeonholes Magazine and baest Journal.