Tidal Tankas & Pachamama’s Plate 

Sarah Key

 
 

Tidal Tankas


Intertidal quilts—

seaweeds, barnacles, mussels,

snails—cover the rocks.

The more delicate refuge

in cracks, creep under boulders.

Under naked moon

our bodies shine together,

mothers and daughters,

ebb and flow, expose what’s under

the volatile voice of surf.

A limpet’s smooth cone

slopes the surf away harmlessly;

the blows of falling

water firmly suction cup

its grip to rock, strengthen hold.

My breasts plumped round

too much for her bow of mouth

slipping off to tug

on nipples purple, bloodied.

No one showed me how to nurse.

A feathered plume thrusts

out from open portals of

acorn barnacles,

then draws back slightly, sweeping

diatoms from ebbing sea.

Sage-green lichens roll

and twist into strange shapes, thrive

on salt spray, swell their

black hairy under-surfaces

to dislodge fine grains of rock.

My mother’s body

was once a sea of form, my

border. Where is she

now? In soft surf, in borrowed

spirals of shell, weathering swells.




 

Pachamama’s Plate 


My daughter drove me to Death Valley’s edge

wishing to swoosh down golden peaks

of the Mesquite Flat dunes on flying-saucer plates.

No sled in the car, we trudged in warm sand,

sneakers so full I longed to go 

lounge in the Furnace Creek pool and scale

back the steam filling my being, scale

down the 110-degree edge

of the day. She bragged how far below sea level we'd go—

straight through Earth’s palate as peaks

of pastels painted us small, two tiny sand

grains on Pachamama’s plate.

We ate at the 49er Diner, plates

laden with fat rested on maps way out of scale

printed on placemats the color of sand.

“Where can we go and get scared to death?”

my girl wanted to know. Waiter Sean, hair in a peak,

pinkied to Rhyolite with a wink and a glow. 

I braked fast and tried not to let go

as the wheel ratttlesnaked the road, almost made plates

of roadrunner chicks! Yes, a rear-mirror peek

found no feathers amiss. As the scales

fell from our eyes, we saw a town peopled with death,

ghost-sculptures dining over the sand

in hollowed-out white plastic shrouds. Uphill the fine sand

gamboled round a crumbling casino deserted ages ago. 

Like the Gold Rushers, my girl had rolled dice with death,

a bottle of pills almost swallowed her whole. I had to steel-plate

my heart to get through. Years have passed since the scale

tilted her back to her self, but before her pain peaked

how many valleys she saw. At sun up, we climbed Dante’s Peak

staring down at the cottony crystals, the salty sands

of Badwater Basin. To scale

up the mountain, she ran and I had to let her go, go, go 

to the top and be first to see three tectonic plates

sparring for space and blooming with life in the Valley of Death.

 

Sarah Key

Sarah Key is Poet-in-Practice at the Hostos Community College Writing Center in the South Bronx, collaborating with tutors to create writing and storytelling workshops. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Interim, Calyx, Poet Lore, anthologized in Nasty Women Poets, American Writers Review 2020, Greening the Earth & more. Her writing lives have included eight cookbooks, essays on the Huffington Post, and currently she is working on an epistolary creative non-fiction memoir that has put her psychically in touch with her great-great grandfather, a Muskogee cowboy. She loves the spiral of a sestina, and is thrilled to have her first published here, based on a trip to Death Valley with her daughter. sarahkeynyc.com