The Most Unlikely Poem I Wrote for this Book

there is a species of bird

with bones so fragile

they’ve taught themselves to sleep in the sky

i know a thing or two

about hollow skeletons and unyielding wings

i know a thing or two

about ending the search

for a place to rest your head,

telling Gravity to come back another day

because you’ve earned a feather of steel

for every time you’ve crash landed

it has taken a thousand shatterings

to become this whole.

I’m in La Ventana, also known as, “the aquarium of the sea.” The unrelenting sun crisps my skin, but I hardly notice, because there are five hundred dolphins surrounding our boat. Our captain, Alex Schmidt, back flips off the edge, disappearing beneath the glassy water.

I plunge through the surface like a spear before I can think of sharks or crakens. Water fills my ears, and I hear the dolphins sing. I cry underwater, my tears like a faucet in the sea.

There’s an earned ease that comes from someone who pours thousands of hours into what they love. Alex looks like he’s kicking back in his living room, as sea lions and dolphins crowd around him, like they know he’s one dive away from becoming one of them.

We’ve been searching for whale sharks since the sun unfolded across the horizon like a god unclenching a sunflower from his fist. My friend INQ and I were hosting a poetry and whale shark diving retreat. At the time, it felt like my muse packed her bags and saluted me with a cigarette in her ear as she walked out the door, leaving no postal address. Which is an obnoxious way of saying: It had been months since I wrote anything.

But poems have a way of finding us when we really need them.

We’re on the tiny speedboat, at this point I’m wearing the day on my skin in blisters and deep crimson, clinging to the sliver of shade. Alex comes to sit beside me, as a flock of birds fly overhead. “You know those birds sleep while flying.” I frowned, “How is that possible? Why?” He shakes his head, “Their bones are so fragile, if they land they’ll shatter.”

“Shit,” I muttered. I looked up at those birds and felt stripped bare. I’d been sleeping in the sky my entire life. A therapist might call it hypervigilance, I called it my natural state of being. If I landed, if I rested, I felt I would shatter.

What is love, if not rupture and repair?

I grabbed a napkin from one of our packed lunches, and wrote the poem just as those birds disappeared beyond the horizon.

My poetry book, Don’t Wait to Light the Candles, releases on May 5th. Pre-orders make every difference for an author. If my work has ever touched you, if you’re looking to gift poetry to a loved one, I would be so honored to have your support. I can honestly say I’ve never put more of my heart into a book.

Xx,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Scribe.