Tidal Tankas & Pachamama’s Plate
Sarah Key
Image by Johannes Mändle
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