The Soft Power of Tentacles and Waves

The ocean will never give you
What you ask. Not cerulean
treasures or secrets
from your love, not even
glass, star-shaped, for your throat.

Barnacles crop white-stemmed
as mushrooms, curve like the molar
of some prehistoric mammal, singly
in my pocket, twined in seaweed
draped in motion. Unmooring gifts

crooked in elbows, shaped by
amniotic fluid, by the sway
of moonlight, by the law
of mouths and greater mouths

that gape, as beached placenta
involuntary ambassadors
on our doorstep. Thank you, thank you
retracting, orb and stalk
under our salted fingers. Fringed
patina that suck our bones
gently, until we come apart
become sand, become glass, become
the dreams we hang

in our windows. Chin in palm
I gaze up through coca-cola
glaciers. Trace spider strands,
dew weighted, constellations
that web us here together: Venus droplets
terracotta Mars. I dream
in watery dreams, searching
up and down the shoreline
for life, beyond our own.

By Brynn Cook

Biography:

Brynn Cook was born and raised in Southern California, leaving to spend six years pursuing her PhD at the University of Virginia. Brynn has now returned to her home state, and currently lives with her husband and twin sister in the best possible shelter-in-place scenario. Brynn has been published in Chaparral poetry, and writes poetry with the hope of one day distilling the strange call of warm October winds.