The Breather: A marine mammal performing a breathing ritual at full moon
After Marguerite Humeau
Light spot, shimmering blood speckler,
thin skin peeling back and undoing,
moon seen from the underside
making shafts of disturbance
through the known world.
Transfigured injury, mutation of
the god-brain, when it meets toxicity,
carbon-gloss, UV tenderiser of the
soul meat, of the safe passages to paradise—
cave of milk-swim, rotating brightness,
calm gold ocean bed, muscles un-furrowed.
A Humpback slides 5000km then back again,
pilgrimage in blue lengths, breathing
through the sea-god’s whirring knowledge glands,
her mackerel-violets smell, her incense of sperm bank,
her verdigris, anointed with vexed and heavy shipping lines,
with thrumming tectonics, meditation on a running void,
empty stomach where the spirit enters, dissolves in acid.
How huge night is, jellyfish tendrils rubbing lightlessly,
crack jaws closing blackness, digesting it,
teeth in the shuddering, roiling verb of becoming,
stars like distant misted-over eyes blinking,
ripped heart-curds, inflamed ritual, desperate,
tender, unsure and open.
Inside the weft of breath and bow and flame,
sea-god raises her huge, damaged, swollen head.
A word comes for, comes for us, out of her
blue-wet-mouth, her jagged-mouth,
her corrupted-mouth, her bloodied-tentacle-mouth:
drown, drown, drown.
The moon has split like a persimmon, or a rancid tongue,
dead flesh sinking for the bite-worms.
It has fallen into the water, for them, to be consumed.
The Dancer: A Marine Mammal Invoking Higher Spirits
After Marguerite Humeau
The temple is a whirlpool,
hot fat breaking down,
the bark of the sea-god’s mind,
which is smooth as marble,
and unrolling without measure.
When she comes to breathe,
the spirit rises, biting of lip,
ecstasy, terror.
Blue for the virgin’s robes, or here,
blue of the sperm-ropes, the tender gullet
choking down god’s soft commands.
The voice of un-earth,
water as the shifting territory,
borderless, mapless, consuming.
Internet cables fraying off,
breaking the kernel of orgasm
in the gut, talking over.
The suffering does it,
praying for the opalescent
marine virtues –
copulation, movement,
linkage, hugeness, breath.
The sound of a sea-prayer
is oceanic static, colourless wailing,
hot ejaculation, moon-rub,
zeroes and ones, a deep boom,
a long, low whistle and a click.
Pulsed call, reverent ritual
formation, bacterial enveloping.
The shipping is a mashed gag,
a silence-wound, and through the ripped water
comes a vomit of torn euphoric songs.
The Dead, The Dancers, and The Air: A shoal of fish performing a breathing ritual in an attempt to bring their dead back to life
After Marguerite Humeau
A body frond, globular lightbulb tail,
anxious dreamscape,
vestigial planet spine –
ancient air, old worships,
rising to the surface of the water like oil.
Can you remember the moment you
realised you’d die?
Carbonise it, press the bones of it down
to sheeny purple gasoline,
the huge lung balloon expanding
and shredding, the huge voice of your god
saying, now you want me.
They are all one voice, ask for the return of their
dead shoal keepers, their threshing soul-hoods,
their glittering, teeming, silver eyes, their mutated
axe heads, their endlessly expressive gill-wounds,
their loved and loving bubble calls, language
of liquid, salt-written.
Each submerged breath undoes hook and trap,
to know the glory of turning inside a wave
is to see paradise, blessing the spell-made rim
as it rises and over-breaks, the heat and cooling
of the tossed and unfurled opening,
white and blue spark-signal, wet annunciation.
Ice sheet mourning and witness,
come back into the pocket of life,
ritual of flow, unbearable sweetness of
the many-body, the choric expansion,
under-throat, blood-current, cold unstitching.
Circular dance formation, thin water structures
which become lava-like, rubberise and collapse,
get heavy as the move, fabricate and enchant.
The hungriness of life is holy, is adamant,
soaking in translucent blood, void-milk
aiding in the re-creation, come back from inside
the darkness and pour, rushing, into the
mutated-jelly mould of rabid life
that they have made for you.
Rebecca Tamás is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century, published by Ignota Books. Her first full length collection of poetry, WITCH, came out from Penned in the Margins in 2019. It was a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation, a Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times and White Review 'Book of the Year,' and a Paris Review Staff Pick. She the 2016 winner of the Manchester Poetry Prize, and a Fenton Arts Fellow. Her new book of environmental non-fiction, Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman, came out in October with Makina Books.
