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Megan Fernandes
A couple go scuba diving and by accident,
get left behind in the water. The boat roars off.
And there they float, in full gear and disbelief,
tanks low on air, stranded in a seamless blue,
deciding if they can survive until the next day, which,
of course, they cannot, because the average person
can only tread four hours without a life jacket.
The couple bicker: Why did we go on this vacation?
Why did you choose this company? Why did I choose you?
And even when it’s too late, with fatigue building
in their arms and waves buoying their bodies
like a whipped dessert, they make their case of a soulmate
gone wrong. Because a real love story would never end like this.
Eventually, the couple must choose their deaths.
One removes their suit and slips into hypothermic sleep,
and the other cuts and spills blood to entice a shark.
Both choices tell us something about our protagonists,
who are maybe not even our protagonists since
they are so bitter one cannot fully root for them.
See, the logic of a couple is like a Beckett play.
Facing the end, you don’t want someone with you
for comfort. You want someone with you to blame.
Jesus, I reply, and cut my steak like a heart.
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I wrote this poem because I still am trying to figure out what a couple means. How intimacy and blame operate. The causality of our decisions. What love can and can't overcome in the face of a simultaneous end. My friend, a prominent queer scholar, said the Beckett line over dinner, real casually, as if this is something everyone should know. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Hanif Abdurraqib on Grief, Music, and Living with Loss

"Memory is tricky. A few years ago I realized I could not remember the sound of my mother's voice anymore. My dear friend Tyler, who we lost when I was in my early twenties, I don't remember what his laugh sounds like anymore. And there is no song that can refurnish the sonics of their living. But there are songs that can act as a kind of silent film of their life. And that serves a purpose. I hesitate to say it's helpful, but it's certainly not detrimental to the process."

via NPR
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dong Li on Evan S. Connell's Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

"Vestigial shards of old legend and lore dart in and out of vertiginous fragments of human folly and futility, now like lightning on a clear day, now like fireflies on a talkative night. The 'I' slyly travails through historical significance and triviality until the tribulations of fear, faith, and ferocity surface in a dizzying dream state, hauling history into the prophetic present, where associative meanings are distilled into a crude and cruel illumination."
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