The Sea Beneath Caroline Street and True Love Comes From

My home will one day be underwater and it will be as if it never existed to anyone else. Where does true love really come from?

the sea beneath caroline street 

scientists say staten island will sink under

the global boiling will drown us first 

but the island was already drowning

redlines bleed through our transit system 

poured into our lakes 

the residents of staten island 

were born to be mermaids

we exchange body hair for scales and gills

legs for tails and fins 

to drown is the island’s birthright

sandy was the time to learn how to swim 

but i’m a runner at heart 

been pacing around in my mother’s womb

i’m from an island that is a graveyard for some 

i’m all scars, bruises, and sore spots 

tripping over uneven sidewalks 

sprinting past flopping bodies  

running for my life, i make the stars seep out functioning street lights 

heavy feet cracking the perfectly paved streets of the south shore 

when staten island sinks 

the more memorable ones will watch 

the sky aflame, our rude waters a-sheen and at my door

staten island is sinking 

the north drowns first

the residents of staten island
were born to be mermaids
we exchange body hair for scales and gills
legs for tails and fins

true love comes from

more than just the heart 

it is the streams of marrow

leaking through withered bones 

true loves slips into my ears 

it is a death rattle

soft, wet 

it pulls my brain out and irons the wrinkles and creases

true love haunts the cave of my stomach 

full of vampire moths infesting the pouch

the little messengers of love free from their cocoons 

but not free from me 

true loves takes your heart captive 

it twists the arteries into knots 

and comes regurgitating out your mouth

a beating heart spit into a demitasse glass

go on now 

drink it up 

Process

I started writing this poem during one of the community studios regarding generative poetry. The theme was about home and unfortunately everything else regarding the workshop I don’t remember. I’ve had the title sitting in my notes under my list of “poem ideas.” It’s a bunch of titles for poems that usually sit there for about three months before I finally write them. I always unintentionally write about home and for this poem I wanted to see what came out if I intentionally thought about home; what that place is to me.

The second poem “True Love Comes From” only exists because I was listening to a Pierce the Veil song. I’m not quite sure how it turned into a such morbid piece, but I love exploring love as a sickness of some sort. It’s not written anywhere in the poem, but I was thinking a lot about this fictional disease, Hanahaki disease, and just what love can do to you through a horror aspect.