Donika Kelly

The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her. The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks  the surface—human, maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp. A wild life. This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber— as if I know what prayer means. I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer. Who. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned. Who. I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue.Can you see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself: to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.

I am not land or timber nor are you ocean or celestial body, but rather we are the small animals we have always been. The land and the sea know each other at the threshold where they meet, as we know something of one another, having shown, at different times, some bit of flesh, some feeling. We call the showing knowing instead of practice. We seem to say, at different times, A feeling comes. What is the metaphor for two animals sharing the same space? Marriage? We share a practice, you and I, a series of postures. Here is how I become a tree [                            ] and you [                            ] a body in space.

I’ve been thinking about the anatomy of the egg, about the two interior membranes, the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases moving through the semipermeable shell. A curious phrase,the anatomy of the egg, as if an egg were a body, which it is, as if the egg could be broken then mended, which, depending on your faith, broken yes, but mended? Well. Best to start again, with a new body, voided from a warmer one, brooded and turned. Better to begin as if some small-handed animal hadn’t knocked you against a rock, licked clean the rich yolk and left the albumen to dry in the sun — as if a hinged jaw hadn’t swallowed you whole. What I wanted: a practice that reassured that what was cracked could be mended or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread. But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black and green, spilling their bile onto whatever’s left, sweeping the interior, drinking it clean? I think,something might have grown there, though I know it was always meant to be eaten, it was always meant to spoil.