“Lake as Body,” by Denise Leto
The salamander, black with red spots climbed into her mouth with its pods, its sticky pods and it pulled at her lips: replenished, stricken. Losing the larger frame of sound she was unable to speak, her voice seized in grainy rivulets, lesser dams. The salamander swam beneath her tongue it was gorgeous and frightened or frightening— she wasn’t certain. It kept being a world in there so she wouldn’t swallow its slick skin hiding in...
“Letter to my Sister in a Mental Hospital,” by Julia Laxer
Snow falls, building like thrush on the freeway. Black palate, no answers. A daddy calls you by name, but you hear soap opera in his voice, see the frazzled tangle of memory in crepe lines. Do you see past our eyes to something else? Answers I cannot ask, you can’t afford, anger. Snow falls. Snow falls, and I call to ask if you can go outside, if you can taste the cold too, taste it in numbers or letters or shivers?...
“The Spinning Field,” by Lisa Nikolidakis
We are silk people. That’s what I tell the dipshits at my new high school, but they call me Spider-Girl. They yell, Hey, Spider-Girl! Tarantula-Breath! Arachne! Because in Tarpon Springs, everyone’s Greek. A tourist might think it’s a sweet nickname, but the rest of us know that before becoming a spider, Arachne hung herself, which is exactly what I’d do if it wouldn’t give them all globs of satisfaction. They’re sponge people, the...
“Moon Shiny Night,” by Michelle Wright
Good Friday morning. The streets are calm as cats. And the salt-soaked mist, creeping up from the beach. We leave the sliding door open at night and through the flywire it feels its way like braille. Before dawn it hangs from the balcony rails and now it’s just a shiver in the hairs on our bare arms. By early afternoon the sky is a cracked crust out past the glimmer of the roofs. Too hot for April. We recline on banana lounges like...
Does the sea remember everything? I wonder.
Does she absorb everything? Does she keep it safe?
Virginia Woolf
. . .
The Q: Can you fathom the spectacle that would be created if we moved together, arms outstretched, close enough to touch?
The Q: What echoes through you that longs to take form—a poem, an image, a mark, a whisper of becoming?
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fathoms Feb 28, 2026 -
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