MPBN is partnering with the Telling Room in Portland in August to highlight the work of young writers. Here's "Fish Hooks" by Emily Denbow.
You live here
You swim in oxygen
Stand brittle beside a tree
And humble beside the ocean
Upon disrupting the sky-bleached
Surface where oxygen
Disperses and wintry water
Carries salt to your eyes and ears
This world swallows you
Entirely in shreds of gray and green
The creatures processing
Breath through their atmosphere
The sun only does so much here
And visitor, you are only graceful
Where you come from,
We are worlds apart
I don’t breathe right where
You come from; anxious gasps—
Erratic currents understand
The neurosis roving my veins
I have lived here just below
The splintered tides of the ocean
Reaching for the glassy
Brown surface of the lake
Hoping away the mud and all
The foggy looming memories
Escaping made sea glass wounds
Blessings but the ocean
It still held voices
Like shark teeth and
Madness like waves
More violent as it stormed
Love tastes like
Fish hooks and blood
Like the breathlessness
of a dying lunch catch
Washing up on silk sands
Or rocky coasts
Romantic but rugged,
Flesh torn from abrupt arrival
I don’t belong here
Emily Denbow is a recent graduate of the REAL School in Falmouth. She says writing has always supported her and that she loved participated in a publishing internship at The Telling Room this year. She says she lives by Bryce Courtenay's quote “First with the head, then with the heart,” from The Power of One.