This is a quiet grave. In is not made of myths, of great barbarous fish, of coral, 

or salt. No one submerges himself with metal and rubber, no one shines her 

white light along the floor. Search parties have been suspended. There is no 

treasure buried here. This is the place of what-is-not. Of a green so green those 

flying above it would call it blue. Of a black so black it glows. This is a world 

with its own species of ghosts--plankton drifting inside her, the barnacles nesting 

on her hips, her wrists, their whole beings mouths frozen in horror. Sound 

turned into silence--like cloth on the floor is the shed skin of the lover. Like 

sheets bereft of the shapes that slept. Once upon a time she was all escape--her 

long hair, siren of copper and cinnamon, burning a comet behind her. Her long 

legs that loved heels and short skirts, that craved the hard slap of the city 

beneath her. You would have read this girl. You both wanted more. But she 

doesn’t remember how she got here, in this bed that consumed her. Why she 

can’t put her lipstick on, why one would press color like a promise to the lips. It 

must have begun with red. But the beginning of this story is lost to the water, 

you could rake its bottom of leaves and sticks like tea, you could spear one of its 

last trout and study the slick pages of its intestine. The girl is leagues and leagues 

away from the first kiss of prologue, but she, throat caked with mud, white skin 

scaled verdigris, must be the message within the bottle. Words grow in her 

belly. It doesn’t matter who put them there. If they are the children of plankton,

descendants of eels and pond scum. They come to her as twins, triplets, and 

septuplets, whole alphabets swimming inside her. Each one is a bubble, a bread 

crumb, a rung to climb to the top. And as she ascends she names them with 

names cradled inside her. Her feet kick and her arms clutch. Her body strong 

and slippery, a great tongue that propels her: A is for apple, B is for bone, for 

boat, C is for candle, for cunt, for cut.