returning to my body…returning to the sea

Amelia Tuerk

My skin feels wrong,
Like some thin plastic stretched over bones and blood.
Bones and blood, I tell myself, because that is what is supposed to be there.
If there is something else in there, I know it is water.

There are fish navigating my ribcage, like some shipwreck or shoreline pylon.
Octopi with little beaks squeezing through my arteries, clouding up my heart.
There are cnidarians floating in and around my lungs.

I let them, because I hope to return them home someday,
To let them out through my mouth and my eyes and my nose back into the ocean,
Back near coral and sand and detritus, back to the ocean.

I wonder if I would return home too.
If I would grow gills and dorsal fins and pectoral fins and return to whatever I was before birth.

I think I would.

Amelia is a student at the Lehigh Valley Charter School for the Arts.

• SLV 2023 Table of Contents
• Voices of the Valley – Alphabetic List of Authors
• Sustainable Lehigh Valley booklet