Remember that dead whale
the neighborhood kids
walked all over?
And the great white jaw marks—
one bite taken after another
along the belly of folded blubber?
It’s the way you were left
standing as I drove from our old house
at Ocean Beach. Like salted water
that rose on windy days,
it covered our skin in sticky residue.
More phenomenon
than real-life thing.
We were made for this—
the tidal predictability
of youth. We crested for weeks
like the albatross I swore I saw. I took that boat tour without you
out of Half Moon Bay. Yes—impossible to keep still,
the open Pacific, binocular vision a true test
of faith. That bird avoided waves,
hid in swells. A perfect analogy to our life
once lived. I loved the ice plant
careening
over everything.
Shock of fuchsia, swollen lobes
crushed underfoot. It was thought the roots would provide
stability to the dunes.
We were wrong about more
than just that. And now—almost steeped in middle-life,
you surface from hidden places.
Faint grit of loose silica still caught
in my throat. My salty cells. Dream-life
blur. Yet—I no longer know you.
You, who hated winter
and now the earth is warming. I hated that Outer Sunset
foggy gloom.
This is all to say—I miss you,
ex-husband. Those words we never used;
we made our own rules. I could knock on the door
of that west coast bungalow still occupied
by kids who are who we used to be.
What I didn’t know then was the ocean,
ever-rising, can be held
in a hand.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 3.
Gabriela Halas immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including Inlandia, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, Rock & Sling, The Hopper, and forthcoming in Ruminate; fiction in The Hopper, subTerrain, Broken Pencil, and en bloc magazine; nonfiction in The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, High Country News, and forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. She has received Best of the Net nominations in poetry (2021 & 2020). She lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. www.gabrielahalas.org.
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