Like languid coral,
I lay motionless in the hospital bed.
The tides had little effect on me
Beneath the surface.
Ebbing and flowing,
Tears stopping and starting when I awoke,
But stared blankly like
A tourist disappointed by bleached life.
Three days,
Immovable and scraped, scraped, scraaaaappeed,
By an ambitious parrotfish seeking a meal
From my flesh like a
Nurse searching for a vein.
My favorite memories would travel past the beak,
Entering the intestine pulverized and sand-like,
Each spec of wistfulness and
Hope of a life unaccomplished,
Begging to be reincorporated in the ocean bed as new,
Healthy sediment.
STRUCK by a spear
Fishermen swift and ominous
Threatening my security and purpose
As a host of other lives lived and one without.
The parrotfish flees and the swirls
Of sand, memory-less
Awaken the coral from a white stupor.
Not halved, but not whole,
The coral separates for reclassification.
Having always been coral,
The scientists, despondent yet ruthless,
Examine the new grooves unstudied,
And begin using a new name.
Curious and unsatisfied,
The name rolls around a spurious tongue,
Before rocking to a stop.
The parrotfish returns once the coral is free to flourish anew, under its right identity.
Author’s note:
Parrotfish are unique fish with beak-like outer jaws that they use to scrape algae and other mineral from coral for food. The scraped material is ground down to a sand by a second set of jaws in the throat, then passed, where it settles onto the sea floor to mix with the other sands.
I attempted suicide in November. I am also a transgender woman. This poem was written to process my father using my real name after losing me, even for a moment, and how that makes me feel.
Xiomara Jean-Louis (she/her) is a Caribbean-American, first-generation graduate student studying Caribbean colonial histories. She orients her career around giving back: she volunteers, writes about U.S. policy toward Haiti to instigate change, and advocates for queer rights. In her spare time, Xiomara writes about her mental health and queer experiences.Â
Instagram: @xianevis_
LinkedIn: www. linkedin.com/in/xiomara-jean-louis/
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