The Gulf
You’re lucky, says the nurse who glues my palm
back together like a parted fault. It could
be worse. It was an accident, striking
the avocado pit, severing it
from soft green flesh. So much to be thankful for—
lips to sip chai lattes, hands
to surf the ripples of a stranger’s body
without much pain— and yet the brain
intent on being something it isn’t,
despises what it is: discontent
with humanity and how depression wraps
around my neck, a Heineken shaken
to foam. I return home with a wrapped hand
and the urge to un- do the doctor’s work,
to wipe the bloody knife along my tongue,
finger the serrated edge of solitude.
Reading Hart Crane, his work opaque,
like a layer cake you can’t cut through.
When Crane lost all hope of writing,
he dove into the Gulf of Mexico.
Stranger to the bodies
below him, below me now— we tread further.
I swim, plunge deeper into myself, the wound
closing, my tongue searching for less.
Perhaps that’s why, before he died, Crane flirted
with handsome sailors, and when he couldn’t
have his way, jumped to free himself
of their whips and words, to end
it there, beaten by waves
of kelp and snapper colliding with his salt-preserved face.
© Christian Paulisich
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. In 2023, he received the Julie Sophia Paegle Memorial Poetry Prize from The Concrete Desert Review. His work has been published or is forthcoming from Blue Marble Review, New York Quarterly, Pangyrus, Rust + Moth, The Ocotillo Review, I-70 Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Invisible City, and others. He is a poetry reader for The Hopkins Review.
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