Estuaries
It happened like this
I stopped my working hand midair
to tread the waterlogged tunnels of memory
or maybe it was your hand that pushed me past
perforations in the paper
we sank raw nerves of our incoming teeth into candy-apples
the buzzing hive of the sea
the late July heat swollen with everything we had become
posing for the bright future, putting the now aside in our pulled-down wetsuits
we dressed ourselves in skin and sand
licked every side of chocolate ice cream as it melted
mom touched the shutter to retire, reset, cure the minutes
we didn’t know were blowing
running naked wisps of wind
we didn’t know we knew nothing
how the sun could leave us, mendicants in bruised darkness
how the moon was on its way
how our brittle yet proud boats of eyelashes and dust
rendered us resolutely under siege
against the gurgling shore
but the spellbinding song of that breaking day
but my country, the country of my brother’s face
spelling words
I arrive on nightmares
I pray for dreams
how history, its wrenching pain, can’t be unlived
how to give birth again to species long departed
the dinosaur, the dodo, the thylacine
tokens of dreams
dreamt
we forecasted fantasy, your mouthful of far-sighted status
my slack eyes piquant for the blue-green algae
of your shark suit over your skinny legs
the helium wishbone of your chest, your ever-inflating gills
the helicopter of you rising up and up to
disallow context to chafe the
slosh of waves
I gorged on the summer air and your tattoo band-aids
maritime cryptogram of your upper body
turned me
inside out
the organ pipes of your raspy voice going on and on
about The Gonnies and staying up past bedtime
to watch the bonfire charge our marshmallow graham cracker sandwiches
in its theatre of flames
seahorse veins pumping your arm
you dove into the treble clef of
endangered speech
I didn’t know we were surrendering our bodies to gravity
evanescent legs to
black water and showering sunlight
the wound heals but the scar reiterates its
unresolved infinitive
I knew it as a head but didn’t know I was taking in myself
my after-body stoked in the hemorrhage of
what hasn’t yet happened
mom persistently apologized, apologized with the kindness of
what she couldn't control
her voice crumbling into an unnatural register to relieve me
pressuring my left arm in her bay
to resume me to a we
she fed our ritual of combing her reserved fingers through my
riddle of curls to log my body as legible to her nimbus eyes
she felt me voraciously yet cautiously as if I were
both shedding myself and returning to
the origin of my body’s compressed wholeness
rewinding me to the nourishment of her preverbal devotional
sheathed in the bewildered parentheses
of my winding-down rib cage against her iron
cord of emotion
I refuse this poem
there isn’t a gesture sweeping enough for our tragedy
glue in the dirge of my wayward flesh
these tears deny ink
I must record its fractal sea glass
to reclaim the full stretch of things
the capacious planet floor
its rocks and shells in my gullet
I must endure inventory indexing The Beach Boys and the
new human I materialize out of dispersal
I must practice its constitutive momentum
I foamed at the lips to become the child who lived
in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of her brother’s
leonine aptitude to quarry light that reminded her
of how silly it all was when they were
sunburned and unashamed of their Southern drawl
but not yet broken
of how only ten million years earlier
their feet were fins
Elly Katz—at twenty-seven, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard—went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, The Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). She is enrolled in the MFA program at Queens College.