Salt
Even before we’re born there’s the taste of salt: the way our fathers sweat as they made us, the hard rim of the cervix, the horned shell of our body collapsing.
Then later, the sharp taste of ocean as we kiss; a palace of spice—the trade route to ecstasy.
Then later still, it’s the private flavor of our grief when our kingness caves. We know what the widow knows, we share the same pillow.
It rings our body citadel—here in this oneness, millions—even in fire the fine grains drop from us as rubies.
The Eel
I am not lucky enough to be an eel.
Blind but knowing life by touch.
The rock’s rough edges.
The slick mud on its belly,
cool and giving.
Living in murky water
where the pulse of a second heartbeat
near the last vertebrae
thumps.
No, I live akimbo.
My eyes tell me stories
my fingers never know.
My legs still awkward.
I need the insult of light
to see my world.
And what is there to say
of my single heart?
Its breakability so very certain
it lives inside a cage.
Galaxies
There’s a planet full of lost things. On it is everyone’s virginity, next door to lost minds, which is catty-cornered to a generation. My St. Christopher necklace is surely there; the one from Poland circa 1942, small as the pad of a child’s pinky, the ones that when severed can still grow back—the pied flesh, like the scarred arm of a starfish.
These things are lost even from each other, so inside this planet is a smaller planet of loneliness. Here, nothing weighs anything, that’s sorrow’s job.
Somehow, we find them. Both planets. Inevitable in that inky infinity that we itch to understand, where we all visit; we wayward astronauts, we small gods of science, we haunted animals.
Carrion
A cement block of a building, grey as a prison. The bus is late. He waits even when I insist he doesn’t. This act his only kindness.
Under his green hoodie I see his chest rise, catch on something, then collapse again. Not saying whatever it is he keeps not saying.
I’m on my way to California, then Japan, then Thailand. I wait for him to stop me—impossible, the arc of a stone already sinking.
We hug. He’s so thin if I squeeze he’ll disappear. He thinks the same of me. I don’t kiss him, but inhale. The smallest ownership.
The sea in Phuket warm, unyielding. I swim past the buoys. My hand slips under the shark’s jaw—pointed, open, articulate.
The Elk
Imagine the empty world.
And inside this newness an arrow;
small, gold at the edges, a stab
of light in the immovable now.
And this arrow is something once dormant
locked in a box in the basement,
or beneath the bed—
something only the spiders speak to.
Life has condensed into singularities:
the epiphany at the traffic light;
the ribboned song of a long-waited text;
the perfect bite of toast.
There was and will always be nothing
and everything;
this aria of words to placate death,
and the sentence of fog
where elk dance pollen
off their hooves.
Leah Saint Marie is an investigative journalist turned filmmaker. During her time as a reporter for the Innocence Institute she helped exonerate a man from prison who had spent 25 years wrongfully convicted. As a filmmaker she wrote the award-winning documentary, Price of Honor, which got Yaser Said on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted (the documentary led to his eventual arrest in 2021). Her script, Spoonful of Sugar, premiered at Fantastic Fest (2022) and was sold to Shudder (you can watch it there in Spring 2023). Her short film, Good Girl, won the Paris International Film Festival. For two years she served as a field producer for the social justice documentary film company, Brave New Films, where she traveled around the United States on a Ford grant interviewing youth activists. Her poetry book, The Eaten, is being published in 2023 through April Gloaming Publishing. She’s producing the podcasts Before the Fade and Pitch! set for release in 2023. She’s set to direct her next feature film, Teatro dell’Amore, in Italy in 2023. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles along with her cat Edith Piaf.
Header photo by Leigh Prather, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Leah Saint Marie by Alison Narro.
