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Somonka for Helen
Today I watched your
hands in class so
small, secret
under the table
I wonder if you saw me
holding mine to look like yours.
Your question is strange,
but its not every day some-
one can make me laugh
about Nietzsche. Look closer-
I was holding mine like yours.
Previously published in Poetry Midwest Winter 2005
The Hole in the Theory
I know what we were doing in the water-
pre-human, legless, amphibian blue.
Too hot for us on the last one, we dove in,
crash-landed, to cool our sizzling scaly skin.
The water soothed us,
washed away the memory
of the last planet-
whoever we left behind,
sizzling, their skin bleached from the sun.
The water smoothed
our consciences like rocks,
rubbed our memories blank like clay.
That was enough for a thousand years-
our feet grew webbed, our lungs changed
back into water organs
and we swam for centuries, millennia.
Tides changed, mountains formed,
and we were happy not to know.
There was nothing to remember
in the face of all that water.
But what was it that finally
drew us to the shore?
How did our bodies remember
our hardened skins, our need for eyelashes?
Why did we emerge,
clawing from the blue
onto hot sand to sprout legs?
Erin K. Brandel has published in The Freehand Press, The Grinnell Review,
and in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine. In the summer of
2004, she received a fellowship to Norcroft, A Writing Retreat for
Women.
Email: Erin K. Brandel
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