To me this poem reads as one of resilience. “Make me a boulder striped with tide stains/on the salt marsh.” Striped but stable within. “Make me a coastline/of shattered language.” A coastline nonetheless, revised lexicon. And those last four lines. What is the cure? Mercy or resilience? What survives? “[An] idea of the sea.” Make me. Unknown only to others. Infinite. – Robert Auld
Cure
Have mercy on me, gods
of transformation.
Make me a boulder striped with tide stains
on the salt marsh.
Make me a pennant, regardant—
a lung, fluttering
itch, a tough flank stretched
between birch sticks.
Make me a coastline
of shattered language.
/
I want to age evenly.
You can carve me out
through hard winters,
you can bend my ribs back
like a two-page spread.
Have mercy.
I’m no bigger than
your fingertip. I’ve sent my name
winging away. Just bones now
and an idea of the sea.
Annabelle Crowe is a rising sophomore at Rice University and hopes to double major in English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her poetry has been published in Asheville Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, and diode poetry journal and has been recognized by the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. She is the poetry editor of R2: The Rice Review, her campus lit mag.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Olivia Alger (University of Rochester, Rochester, NY); Alixa Brobbey (Brigham Young University, Provo, UT); Reuben Gelley Newman (Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA); Annabelle Kang (Concordia University, Montreal); Hannah Pandya (Simmons College, Boston, MA); Noel Peng (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ); Simran S. Shaju (Travancore Medical College, Kollam); Sahara Sidi (Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT); Amelia Van Donsel (Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY); Kelsie Ward (Sage College of Albany, Albany, NY); Lisa Zou (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA)
Gigantic Sequins 