What Survives in the Shallows
Penang, Malaysia
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Maybe the naked ankle
of the rooster I saw last week, its crown
shocked coral. Maybe the walk I took
through a copse of crabs, my hands keeling open
in the sand. How I felt the metamorphosis: surging
towards the tide newborn & pious.
Then, I was sure of the water & every face it reflected back
in a sheen of brown. Why did the crab never share
the faces it saw? As is the nature of all shell-fish things,
or to protect me: mermaids still
still in their department store packaging,
crumpled flags, the marionette movements
of a child under high tide. Everyone shrieked
hysterically at the fervent burgeoning of limbs,
even as the water spilled yellow
& dulcet over my face. I wiped my own chin.
These days I walk into all my parties
uninvited, my pockets of unopened jokes,
tissues flushed black, an albatross’
forgotten wing. Have you ever seen one smoking?
How the bay coughed a blush
of gray fire & I was late in capturing it on film.
Everybody laughs at the image. I start again:
Why did the catfish swim
to Italy? I imagine the rounded magnet of its eye
in Murano glass. The unblinking image
of a martyr, stillborn around a dainty neck. The
kind that has never flushed crustacean-red,
or choked on a strand of pearls. I scrape my right knee
while dancing on the rocks & it wells blue,
sea-salt glaze. I tell a story about
a rooster learning to swim under streetlights
& am ushered out for fowl language. What else am I
supposed to tell of survival? The pavement sloshes
around my heels, its iridescent spine
glowing in the water. I stand higher
than sea level. Afterwards, I practice
my openings in my bathroom mirror: a river
without a head. The flightless bird
& its oiled mouth. I gargle with tap-water,
spit a cluster of pincers into the basin. I will
scrape it clean in the morning.
Reflection
Growing up next to the Andaman Strait, my friends and I spent countless hours cracking jokes by the tide. I have heard a long list of marine-related puns over the last 17 years, whether they’re issued by my friends’ rapid-fire wit or as part of the innumerable ocean-based worksheets my teachers have passed out over the years. But how can we continue to laugh, to poke fun, at a dying body? Throughout this poem, I hoped to reconcile dark humor and climate change as I threaded in seemingly incomprehensible jokes, from the selfish crab to a smoking albatross. But really, the ironic truth is that we–both the speaker and the audience–are the selfish ones. That the only reason the albatross is smoking is because of us. Why else would a catfish feel the need to move to Italy, if not to escape the encroaching doom of its own home? And how much are we truly allowed to joke of survival, when our own planet is on the brink? The final line of the poem reeks of the attitude that we have been approaching the climate change problem with–that it is not our fault, that there is still time to take care of it some other day. I hope that this poem will be a sobering truth as to how much longer the world can afford to treat this situation as somebody else's problem.