Poems by Lis Sanchez

Boy with Watercolor Hair

by Lis Sanchez

From Canary Summer 2019

Lis lives in a wooded neighborhood of a metropolitan area inside the Catawba River Watershed. Poplars and old oaks tower above her home, which looks down on a backyard ravine with a dry creek that supports deer, coyote and fox.

Down shore, another tern
listing on the tidepool tilt,
headless

one wing waving, tremulous,
good-bye good-bye

Thirty strides, another headless bird, then more

strung between strands of kelp
at equal intervals,
as though in sympathy with some aborted plan

From pool to pool a red pail leaps—
small arms flashing like shiners

A boy’s head burns
a shivering yellow
like a watercolor sun

When I was small a red octopus sprang from these rocks
after a kelp-colored crab

Its tongue crushing the shell sounded like your teeth inside your heart

Knee-deep, the boy clatters his rabble of hermit crabs—

Pink fingers churn and lift the shells to the sun—
their whorls glow like young ears
eyeballs waggle on short stalks, knuckled legs

Then my shadow darkens
his watercolor hair

Words written on many signs
fall from my mouth,
marring his gladness

As if he understood algal blooms
and why we mustn’t trouble
the sea’s creatures

Red blossoms savage his cheeks
I’m not even touching them, he explodes,
fists thrashing the water’s face
— a swinging of snot
His shrieks swing like gulls grabbing up small claws
hurling one after another
at my feet

From the bluff, looking down at the bulge —
harbor seals bank like dark cumulus
not rumbling — shaking with seizures

What good is looking back
to see if the boy is splashing his noiseful pail

as though each creature were clamoring simply for his joy

as though the tide’s roar were his own
endless companion

and the least treasure caught in his fist
worth fighting for?

Beside him I am a grain of sand.

© Lis Sanchez

Least Terns

by Lis Sanchez

From Canary Summer 2019

Down the bluff to the crystal pools
into the starry nave into the garnet claws
into the urchin’s silver spines

moving down the downshore tilt
a tern wracked in the black stone tide
undulates in her torn gown

she has no head
she has no head and must recall
her way by trailing coral feet across the tilt

a second bird she has no throat
she has no throat and has to pipe
through wormholes in her bones

another dead against dark stone she has no wings
she has no wings and glides and slaps
breast-up across black rock

twisting on the beating tilt she has no wings her wilted gown
her coral feet she can’t recall her bones must pipe
pearlescent orb she glints

repeats repeats so many pearls the sea blinks
the sea can’t stop all that we do
the sea repeats the pearls repeat

the sea laves its hands of us
it takes us back it gives us all its treasures
we give nothing

when the sea has nothing left to give
it gives again if only our dread charms
across its jilted heart

Previously published in Journal of Wild Culture, March 2018.