nectar poetry

SHAREEN K. MURAYAMA

Title: Cast Away Poem: Swimming in a pool on an island surrounded by ocean is like crying over a movie where siblings reunite after a parent’s death; when really you’re just crying over a movie where siblings reunite after a parent’s death. Blame the soundtrack, unbottling what’s urn’d like a child-proof cap, a shallow wound. But in my story I was drowning. In my story, he doesn’t save or ruin me. I swallowed panic. I drowned things like bodies inside me, downed rain.hip first.broken in half in a tube.no hands.the last & first to come out of the womb, a softly stretched shirt. I grew up & over flooded someone else’s ocean instead of diving in, lying at the bottom, lying to parents, plot-caked tile marked. They bear the sun & shame— increasing alertness.alarm.whirlpooling. There was no one left to save me, save my brother. How evenly flat you & red dirt stained others. You can never construct carnations: a funeral cart, white. The end of a map. Other animals have alternate self-protection methods. Seconds before a wooden bowl hits the tile, I know exactly where it will crack, like how I can spot a savior when cold-blooded animals change colors too swiftly—edged down, jeans spread. There are times when I’ve said no to pie.to acid.to boys who didn’t know what they wanted: to camouflage themselves. I wonder if I’m the broken part in the wooden bowl, like a pool in the middle the ocean, holding my pieces together, & I’d cry like crying over a movie about

Shareen K. Murayama is a Japanese-Okinawan American poet and educator who lives in Honolulu, Hawai`i. She spends her afternoons surfing and her evenings with her dog named Squid. She’s a reader for The Adroit Journal, a Featured Poet at Negative Capability Press, and her art is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, Bamboo Ridge, & Agapanthus Collective. You can find her on IG & Twitter @ambusypoeming.

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