“…every wish one lives for or doesn’t…”

A poem.

...The body remembers
every wish one lives for or doesn't, or even horror.
- Yusef Komunyakaa
("The Body Remembers")

She wakes, her body rolling over waves 
that do not crest.
The tide has carried her out, far beyond 
the limits of her mother’s permission— She fears 
she will not make it back.

Regret lodges itself inside her chest, aches 
where her heart hangs suspended in a 
cage of white bones—
Or it cools into a leaden column that keeps her 
standing at attention, a good little soldier ready 
to obey orders—
Or it crouches in a place of skulls and washed out 
roads, burns into layers of sediment that flame red 
and orange and purple when the sun sets—

Regret is a shapeshifter. The moment you glimpse it,
it is no longer what it was. 

Once it was a yearning, a wish.

Behind shimmers of heat that blur the line between 
the living and the dead, her wish survives 
in tiny flowers that brave flash floods, relentless 
sun. It blossoms close to the ground. The desert 
cannot kill it—
though good little soldiers can trample it 
without a thought,
a universe squashed in a single misstep—

	Sit near, the dry wind whispers, but not too near.
	Be still. The desert will hold you both.

And now she sees along the crooked shore lined 
with seaweed and crab carcasses, with driftwood 
and a stingray’s cast-off shell— Her wish beckons 
to her behind the glare.

She flails against the waves with childish fists. She sinks 
like treasure trapped inside a bottle. Words blaze 
against her bones.

	Be still, the current croons.  
	The salt will bear you up. 
	Now 
	Open your hands.