STRANGE TIDES

In your mother’s eyes I was a mystic woman. You introduced me as your friend from New England and I knew what your mother made of me: a girl from the sea, brine-mouthed and bloodless, here to steal her eldest daughter away from her. Your mother was a widow in the wrong era. Antebellum pride, lemonade and lightless smiles over the dinner table as you sat straight-backed in your chair. At night, I heard her hissing at you through the mothwing walls: marrying this girl will never make you happy. She longed for her sugar-cookie child from old Christmas cards, the daughter who wore tulle and played piano at parties. A blue-eyed baby and a son-in-law with calloused palms. But she was cursed with you: her cigarette daughter in a dark coat, weak for the salted exhale of women from the water. Weak for the bruises like coins I left on your thighs. On the night of our wedding you searched for pearls deep inside my chest, hard and doused in moonlight. You bit at my neck and I called it cartography. You sang in your sleep and I called it the wind. I breathed in the smoke of your wrists, and when I closed my eyes my dreams were green and spiraling, like sea monsters inked at the bottom of old maps.