Kelle Groom
Natalie Said
at MIT they were talking about the flood.
A student said the problem isn’t
that our wall is too low,
because no wall
is high enough to save us.
Instead we should become like pearl divers like
mermaids, adapt backwards get gills
prepare
to go back into the water.
It was November in Far Land it was yesterday in the lab,
it was the harbor & light house, but you can barely see it
beyond one boat left under the clouds.
One night in Florida in a classroom
of students preparing to take a test,
I had to know the meaning
of there where the real subject
follows the verb: There is very little time.
I was nervous I wouldn’t be able
to hang on
to what that means.
I have a problem with the early dark, I told Natalie.
Yes, she said, that’s a problem here. I wondered how cold
drowning would be,
how much would I fight
before I believed I was in bed
blanketed. The problem with believing we need a wall
is the problem of asking the wrong question.
What if everything is the wrong question? The moon
is five days old. In Alaska the seagulls all live in the trees.
Natalie’s looking for work, she’s working for free,
she’s been here 17 years, a decade in a barn.
I can’t talk to her, I said there’s nothing to hang
onto, except now, we have mermaids & pearl
divers, & the student from MIT
who is going to Japan
to learn from the Ama, to hold her breath, swim
to the bottom of the sea, who will let out
a long low whistle, & survive.
Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections: Spill, Five Kingdoms, Luckily (Anhinga Press), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals. Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, an Oprah O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor’s Pick. In 2014, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Groom is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and is director of the Summer Workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
Click here to visit our Kickstarter campaign, help us produce our 2018 list, and claim your reward!