Now to chart a way
of skinning waves,
to throw spray
pink inside a rising moon.
Now to slice beneath the bloom
of blue
and caesura from a curled
womb.
Now to be sewn in foam
and still to breathe,
to be a tongue
for slitting swells and breaks.
Now to whisper
too long into the fetch until
no breath left. Now
to feel the last pulse in a set
carve names across my back
in dim and brackish light.
Now to stitch across
all my definitions of drown.
Matt W. Miller is the author of Club Icarus, winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems. His work has appeared in Slate, Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, Florida Review, Third Coast, Poetry Daily, and other journals. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches English and coaches football at Phillips Exeter Academy where he also directs The Writers’ Workshop at Exeter.