fiction, summer 2022

SYRENA CONTEMPLATES THE QUESTION

“DO YOU TALK?”

AFTER PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES

I speak as the water lily, perennial nymph
blooming on the tannin-blue pond. I could
list the twenty-two ways pond is different
than ocean, starting with empathy & coral.
I knew a girl who learned irony from a poster
of the open sea. More than anything she wanted
to be the saltwater on a drowning man’s
crown, to slip into his eye & sting just so
he’d know he was still alive & whisper
an hourglass name in her wake. I wonder
why children never sing water water
we all fall down if water is deeper
than ash & if water chose to save a man
who never met a mermaid, what makes
you think it will save me—I start to say,
but your eyes are clinging to my tail
like a pair of heart-empty barnacles
desperate for anything to eat.

&

elisa contemplates

the dictionary

after The Shape of Water

My mother taught me to use my hands
instead of my tongue to compose
feelings, draft verbs onto the air. Rein
the wind, my mother told me, but don’t
lick the dust off its saddle. I was born
with a voice. I conversed with twittering
mobiles & petty cats. Three scores
along my pale neck cut the sound
from my throat. Too deep to know
why. Remember when we all had gills?
Remember how we needed them?
I don’t remember tasting the inside
of my mother’s belly, but I can almost
remember how it felt, the taut slime of it,
like a sun of leather stretched over
the drum, stitched tight, the air’s voice
insistent & hungry & not at all quiet.

jessica hudson

received her Creative Writing MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she worked as an associate editor for Passages North. Her work has been published in The Pinch, West Trade Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Pithead Chapel, and Sweet Lit, among others.