clear, smooth rocks and black water,
skies wide and silent, fog grey
and we are lounging with the seals,
who fear us even in their rut, look aside
and focus on each other. we have
noticed there are less of them each year,
so we eat fewer feasts. It is
a luxury now, like big tuna and living
through the quiet killer that came after
the quakes, that left no mark but slayed us
in our numbers. we sing sorrow songs
that hover in the water like anglerfish
beaming out grief, dangling it to tell our
scattered numbers “here we survive.”
we hear the jagged bird that rips the sky,
slip away from the seals, into the waves,
having found five more like us, bubbling
our greeting in mutual love of survival,
go deep, down past plastic and rubber
detritus, down into the dark underneath,
where we sing the song of searching still.
| Elizabeth R. McClellan is a white disabled gender/queer neurospicy demisexual lesbian poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chickasha Yaki land in what settlers call the Mid-South. In kan other life, ka is a domestic and sexual violence attorney. Ka is a previous winner of the Naked Girls Reading Literary Honors Award, a 2023 Rhysling Award finalist, and recipient of the Judi Neri Scholarship for Disabled Poets. Kan work has appeared in Utopia Science Fiction, The Future Fire, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Apex Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Chrome Baby, Apparition Lit, and others, including Salt, Sand, Blood: An Anthology of Sea Horror and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mother: Tales of Love and Terror anthology. Work from kan is forthcoming in Small Wonders, There Used to Be a House Here and the Utopia Science Fiction Best of Utopia anthology. Kan can be found on Twitter and Bluesky as @popelizbet, on Substack at popelizbet.substack.com, and on Patreon at patreon.com/ermcclellan. |  |