Night waters

 I wear the waves around my hands like a loneliness.

The top of my hand a break in the sea. I was

a stranger, human, quite small. I fainted

and convulsed, so found myself a small red boat,

like the booths of a diner, in which to sail away

into the thinner and greyer points of night: that heat;

the stillness like another body wrapped up in fog.

I did not listen to another body or to the steamboat

that cut through the water like a heavy branch. I swept

concrete floorboards like a baker. Firmed onto my womb. He

listened, he did, as I heaved weighted breaths

into the familiarity of a pale night. When I tell

my children, it will be a story old as water: how I curled

the silk of my ancestors around my wrists, over and over,

until my wrists ached. I knew nothing but to save myself

from the night, when the night turned backwards, became itself.

Loisa Fenichell's work has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications, such as Winter Tangerine Review, Voicemail Poems, Guernica Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her debut collection, "all these urban fields," was published by nothing to say press. She is an MFA candidate at Saint Mary's College of California and currently lives in Oakland, CA.