Ars Poetica for Words New and Used

Let us reclaim the once too-written trope for when moon hauls sea
across the flood-plain—the word for that fog-knotted belt of sand
we walk below the bluff. And then let us reclaim the word for that wet
silver veil where ebb tide slips past moon-snail collars in sighing mud.

A right whale and her calf arrive too soon and we worry. What if
the food fish aren’t already in? And what of the krill-sieving goddess
who has barrelled west to east across the Arctic? We imagine her in weak
March daylight, her skin a frazzled opal hemstitched by too thin ice,

blowhole hurling unseasonable slush across the world’s cracked skull—
feeling her way south. Let’s add a new word to our basket, for brain cells
some say were not made for thought, but seem to understand the planet’s
shift—able to do the math: Safety = Sonar x Water Pressure’s snap.

Let us now call scrim and mist the sturm und drang of sea rise. And glial
cells, the whale’s built-in abacus—let us calculate how we might all live.

Miriam O’Neal’s newest collection is The Half-Said Things (Nixes Mate, 2022). She is Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. She has published in Galway Review, The Waxed Lemon, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. New work will appear in Lily Poetry Review soon. Her book, The Body Dialogues (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020) was nominated for a Massachusetts Art of the Book Award, and she was named one of two Finalists in Verdant Journal’s 2024 Poetry Prize. O’Neal is the current Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA where she hosts Poetry the Art of Words, the longest continuously running reading series south of Boston.