Lizzy Burnam 🐞

      “Nothing vast enters the world of mortals without a curse.” - Sophocles 


It goes like this: you are drowning. 
You are drowning and while you are drowning, 
a refracted wisp of sunlight underwater 
warms and blinds you at the same time. 
It feels like the deep breath you aren’t taking. 
It feels like the sand, hot as glass 
beneath the stinging soles of your feet. 
You notice it like a fish does a worm on a hook
and for a moment you forget 
about the ocean in your belly, churning estuary 
to the throat where quarrels hatch and die 
on the same uninterrupted tide. 
A state of transition: of filling, of emptying, 
and of slowing inspiration to right yourself, 
to break through into the lightness of air at all. 
You can no longer tell the difference 
between the floating and the fall. 
You see your life re-enacted in that wisp, 
rewound through millennia, 
and at the start, you’re not a baby 
nor an egg, nor a seed, 
but a glacier, colossal and crystalline. 
You remember that before there were churches, 
there were stars and horizons; blues as deep as the mind 
could comprehend; reds as short-lived, as incinerating. 
The hymn of the great whale carried through the current, 
a siren larger than death and just as cold. 
You remember how slowly you melted
and the steep valleys you carved into the earth
as if you’d claw the world to pieces 
to be recognized as anything—a something 
that was there, no matter 
the venom of god or the bread of him. 
So, who were you, then? 
And did you bear the same name 
through the single-cell bacterium, belching methane, 
up into the first green sprout, reaching 
toward the sun as you are now? 
Woman with the brackish tongue, you are pure and hollow 
as the moonless night, and this is how you drown: 
like a shadow, when the morning comes 
to flood the darkness with its light.