D. WALSH GILBERT
Halfway Under
after Drowned Women, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Poland) 1921
I mouth a glint of copper
and misjudge that the metallic taste’s a fishhook.
Insensible in the numb of ether,
the gulch of anesthesia so cavernous, I vanish
as if a rat has swallowed half my head.
The sun has fallen to the bottom of the sea.
I float languid, in and out.
Absinthe’s toxic wormwood greens half my face.
My fingers web, and I let them.
A gauntlet of voices elongates like colors in the rain:
how you imagine the dead would call to you.
Blanket-soft drowning
never expected as buoyant,
so comforting, and yet so cruel:
a swell of whales moaning for each other in the fog.
D. Walsh Gilbert is the author of Ransom (Grayson Books, 2017). A Pushcart nominee, she was recently named the winner of The Ekphrastic Review’s 2021 “Bird Watching” contest. Her work has most recently appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Canary, The Awakenings Review, and the anthology, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. She serves on the board of the non-profit, Riverwood Poetry Series, and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review.