Two poems by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Sarah Blake
The Sea Witch as Joanna1
“her hair was wet, she was mostly naked, and she said she had been in the water”
Years earlier, something went wrong, and
she found herself upon the shore as a girl.
When the police found her, they asked, Are you hurt?
I don’t know, she said in her girl voice.
Where are your clothes? Where are you from?
Can we call someone for you? Are you hurt?
They brought her sweats from a locker
and she saw in a mirror how they fell
over her new form. What they hid
of her new body and what they didn’t.
They brought her coffee. She put it down
after a sip and someone said, Bitter.
They took her picture. They said,
Someone will recognize you. Call in.
They asked, Do you remember anything?
The sea, she said.
Do you remember anything before the sea?
The sea.
They offered to take her to a shelter.
She let them. She noted every street,
every window display, dresses and cakes.
She thanked everyone in the way
she’d observed thanking. And when
everyone was asleep, she went back,
and the land let go of her fast as it could.
______________________
1Around 3:15AM on Tuesday, the 4th of March 2017, Fresno police found a woman
wandering confused down the middle of a street. She claimed to be a mermaid named Joanna.
https://apple.news/AH5m7jUdpQTuMh0sH3g4dfw
The doctor says, “your urine is testing a little alkaline,
a little basic.” The sea witch holds back a cackle—
of all the things in the world to be called.
“A pH of 8,” and the sea witch completes her sentence,
like the sea.
“I recommend vinegar,” the doctor says,
and then tedium and paperwork and checking out.
At RiteAid, the sea witch finds white vinegar in the aisle
with the cleaning supplies. Swiffers, Windex, detergent.
She opens the jug and coughs hard at the smell.
She recalls the doctor, asking how often she has sex,
if she has sex in the shower, if her underwear is cotton,
if she dries off well. I do not dry off well, she had said.
“Well then.”
She takes a gulp of the vinegar and nearly screams,
gapes and reaches for a broom handle—an employee
restocking sponges turns only her head.
The sea witch is scrambling now
through her memory of the appointment.
Was the doctor a woman more like herself
than she’d realized?? Her human throat burning.
Had she promised her anything? Anything at all?
Sarah Blake is the author of Let’s Not Live on Earth (2017) and Mr. West (2015), both from Wesleyan University Press. Her chapbook Named After Death was published in 2016 with a companion workbook from Banango Editions. Past recipient of a literature fellowship from the NEA, her debut novel Naamah is out now from Riverhead Books.
