Brighton Pier, burnt down and always burning down. Salt channel, red dress 

made for more clement weather, fire farflung from the wreckage caught 

round my waist. Pale sunlight, chalk sisters cleaving to the east. The 

hegemonic world and a hedgewitch slithering free. Squint against the 

wind—peer through the porthole. Slip through the portal. 

Cape Cod; the edge of the Atlantic in all its golden gloom. Runes in the sand, 

bottle-brown crab. First communion with the ocean. Blue ginger sky, sunpeel

imminent, druid’s glass on diasporic shores. Released from a hot froth of

seafoam—revealed to a love on the cusp of commitment. Snake egg, spyglass,

eyestone, eyeteeth. A glimpse at the witch denuded. 

Marseille, the boats of neroli and cinnamon. Turquoise from turquoise, 

shore of my ancestors out there somewhere. Bones of my past selves down 

there somewhere. Scream flush with bubbles, reintroduction in a tongue I 

no longer speak. Two tides, two temperaments: womb-blood and heart-

blood. The choke-rush, the influx. Water at the weakest point. 

Manitoulin; Meldrum, cove and coven and covenant. Raspberry bramble, 

dock spider scramble, the house that sighs in cedar. Unlikely find in the 

cradle of wave. A new wound flushed with freshwater—no need for salt 

sting here. Protection, an exit for a poisoned year. Through the hatch, the 

sumac, the moon. The lavender dusk. The self-healing dawn.