H. K. Rainey lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is poetry editor of the literary journal 580 Split. She is an MFA candidate at Mills College in Oakland where she studies poetics. Her poetry has appeared in Beginnings, The New College Review, The Marr’s Field Journal, and the anthology Word Trips: Poems from the First Coast (Hidden Owl Books, 2007). Her critical essay, “Along Comes Something: Mapping Motion in Lyn Hejinian’s Happily” is forthcoming in Jacket Magazine. She has read in the Mutanabbi Street Reading Series and Acker’s Dangerous Daughters, and will be featured in the Bang Out Reading Series in the Mission District of San Francisco in April.

for Sharon Doubiago

i. West-facing dormer window

grey, shell-less beach
ocean without sound
ocean ocean ocean
shh shh shh

stiff-legged shorebirds
feasting— the burrowing crabs—
a new way of keeping time:

ocean etches shell
once held a living thing
clasped, alabaster palms,
now opened,
worn down, and empty

time hollows sand from the vessel.

oh ovary
oh ocean

ii. South-facing, double-paned window

I dreamed:
I brought my mother
to see you,

mother of pearl
unbroken sand dollar,

but you and your other lover
were sleeping
behind

the black-tongued doorway
of an unfamiliar house
both drunk
both
from the same cup

iii.) watching the gray, algal stones
under waves

separate from me

my vagina
parted from myself
by an ocean of belly-skin

the labia, feathered out
like the fronds of a living barnacle
open
closed

this curious creature,
born free-floating
has latched itself
onto my pubis
and calls out

iv) to the tide rolling in

surrounding the black rock
rising up
a great Silverback in the jungle of the Pacific.

The word means peace
nature’s great paradox.

Peaceful is
not the same as cold
our great, dead, cold
sea.