Abide means sickness and sarcoma, waves
at your chin and satan’s grin
won’t swallow. Engulfed in saline
the buoyant body bobs
in limbo. Only in dream
can I breathe water but here
I wake where
fear stays.
I was introduced to Julia over at Narrative RX through the CPE residency. About a month ago, I attended one of their, online, close reading workshops. This poem came as the result of a free writing exercise. I like the idea of defining a word poetically, which is an idea I stole from Christian Wiman’s poem “Every Riven Thing.”
