Minor God of the Mouth Where the Saltwater Ends
by Isabelle Doyle
Where my river begins the boys toss their beer cans in and do backflips off the cliffs, slow-float
starboard alongside flashing plastic cylinders through spring tide and in tall grass, shadow
slivering my face, moon ladling out my eyes, I lay on my belly and the night licks my spine—I
actually leave my body, watch the boys from the troposphere for comet-blue hours, swaddle
immaculate knowledge of their emerging end as they disappear beyond the mouth to bathe like
devils in saltwater where arcane and thundermist god-giant ocean fish smell their boy skin, taste
their one chance, know it is my right to rapture whatever returns salt-filthy to my swan-silver
arms: they slips skins ahum with foam into a sea-gravity and become essentially fluttering, moon
making shallow puddles of light among nightglow shucks of butterfly-tender muscle. I lay in
wait on their fate awash in the death rattle of their laughter, watching my water practicing her
swallowing, minnows a scaled symphony of ecstatic leaping, all slick amphibians lambent with
anticipatory shining, scanning this breath-stretch of planet for my ad infinitum of freshwater
sirens.
Isabelle Doyle (she/her) is the author of “O'Riley,” a poetry chapbook published by Jacar Press in November 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition, a semi-finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2018 Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University. Her writing has been published in DIALOGIST, Map Literary, The Chiron Review, The Madison Review, Bluestem Magazine, Typo Magazine, The Eunoia Review, The Red Eft Review, Cargoes, Street Light Press, Thin Noon, The Round, and Clerestory. She is currently a Graduate Council Fellow and Truman Capote Literary Scholar at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
