Self-Portrait as Oil Spill, and: Virginia Beach Haibun
2022; Indiana University Press; Volume: 133; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2979/tra.2022.a876689
ISSN0041-1191
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoSelf-Portrait as Oil Spill, and: Virginia Beach Haibun Ariana Benson (bio) Self-Portrait as Oil Spill In the brief still, I appear within a sickening iridescence. My skin muck-pocked like a Pollock. Fish bubble up like zits, heads bloated, leaking. Waves of rot waft into the air, the deadsweet eau de parfum of never-hatched eggs licks my neck—the smell of sulfuric neglect, of ante-life shriveled on the vine. A duck's tailing, V-shaped wake furrows my brow. The hapless bird looks nothing like the downy ones in Dawn commercials—cute, and thus, worth saving with lathered, neon blue savon.Pitiful, yet unpitied, a once honking bellow now a choked bark. Her sun-bright eyes set into midnight, left leg cuffed by congealed sludge, she spirals. So, too, do I swim around nothing but myself. I rise to survey the whole of the inlet, now stippled at the edges, surface puckered like chapped lips shedding dried-out pigment. Then fingers unfurl like kudzu around my neck, dunking my head, pulling me into a kiss with my own dark simile. Filth warps the red hyacinth buds of my lungs that burn bloody with each futile gasp; my own ecosystem in beta decay. I know now what the drowning see just before they drift stagnant: nothing but oil, even in the cleanest of seas. Just as stars start to spark in the sky of my dying, the grip relents, satisfied with its vicious baptism. I can't tell you what was reborn within me, but I am certain of what expired: everything but the whites of my eyes and teeth. I hear footsteps retreating into horizon behind me and whip my head around, hoping to find the face of the one who has tried to send my being into the past tense. My lashes drunk with greasy mascara, I see only shadow. A barge rolls by and in my frantic waving for help, I catch a glimpse of my own hand, palms black as all that ever was, knuckles sticky with crude guilt. I wipe my face, turn back to the spill in disbelief. What had I expected to see except myself? [End Page 5] Virginia Beach Haibun At this hour, pelicans trail their own shadows over the shore in flight. Ghosts of their own futures. Upon landing, talons tip around shells fragmented like fresh-bitten bon bons, smooth outers giving way to gooey silt. The sky a robin's egg with cirrus streak cracks. A lone jellyfish bobs—a melting ice cube in a soured glass of black tea. The breeze smells of taffy sweetened with sand. Silken seaweed catches between toes and plastic six-pack yokes. Cigarette stubs sprout up pale orange. Like the underwing of a migrating butterfly. Or the slush of a half-eaten creamsicle freeze. Or the apricot swoop logo on the putrefying cup in which the treat was served. Littered containers stain tiny scooping fingers blue, make for perfect sandcastle molds. Above a sea of trash-plastered castles reigns one. King Neptune, bronze fists and gaze, trident prongs chipped like shark teeth that wash aground once in a peach moon. A Monarch settles on his crown before being swept up in the wind of late summer sojourn. Swear—I heard them say goodbye. two royals, flesh and stoneno secret which will surviveour creeping winter [End Page 6] Ariana Benson Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and is a graduate of Spelman College. Her poems are published or forthcoming in POETRY, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Auburn Avenue, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor, and elsewhere. She is the 2022 Eliza Moore Fellow for Artistic Excellence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and the recipient of the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness. Copyright © 2022 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University
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