This is where I keep my ocean—in a small grey drawer
with a light-brown knob.
Whelk, clam, scallop, mussel, snail. Smooth, striated, spiraling,
radiating, ribbed.
Shell words: mother of pearl, nacre. Nacreous, iridescent, bleached,
pearlescent. Sea-purple, sea-pink,
the blue blue difference between the inside and outside
of a mussel shell.
Also, my chosen stones—worn flat, bashed round; flat and stackable,
oval, egg; black, white, speckled grey; a pale green island on which
to be cast away. Bottom jaw of a loon, translucent husks
of tiny horseshoe crabs, a sliver of wood worn to the shape
of a baby spoon. For lift: feather of a gull, feather of a great blue
heron—birds eye view of tumult, sea spray,
seals, sharks, fishing boats, whales. In the drawer where I keep
my ocean, everything is cast off,
wind-born, wave-dropped, wrecked by storm, moon, time; lost
at sea—if found, if salted away.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 6.
Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (2021), winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have lately appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University.
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