Raye Hendrix
The Island
—for Annelyse Gelman
the entire trip you pointed at things I kept missing:
the volcano in the distance,
snowbright & obvious
a leaf strung up by spider silk,
a corporeal ghost
beyond the broken hunk of seawall
the clear water, the stones
graying a cold ocean floor
( & I tried not to imagine
drowning )
you pointed at salt-bleached
barnacled shells
dark lengths of bull kelp
wearing sea foam like lace
the surf-drenched corpse
of a rat, strangled by trash
( ( I tried not to imagine
drowning in water that cold ) )
you pointed at a child
dressed as a skeletal bride
collecting halves of Crassostrea,
barely alive & already
given to haunt
on the ferry leaving the island
you pointed again at the volcano
the bonewhite spines
of lower mountains
then the sunset splitting the slim
slip between dark water
and darkening sky
how it turned the distant snow
-peaks to beacons of redgold fire
( ( ( & I tried not to imagine
drowning, tried to do it
your way, pay attention,
wonder without drifting
within—
Would the freezing surf
feel like a field of diamonds?
Would it be too cold
to feel anything at all?
_____
Statement of Homage
Annelyse Gelman is a poet and friend who breaks open my brain in the best ways. We met during our MFA in Austin, Texas, and after graduating both moved to Oregon. After months of isolation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we drove up to Seattle to spend Halloween weekend together, staying in Keetje Kuipers’s house on Bainbridge Island while she was a visiting professor at the University of Montana. Annelyse and I were both in difficult headspaces—she in grief and I in a prolonged, pandemic-induced OCD flare-up—but Annelyse has this incredible way of finding wonder in everything, even the ordinary and grotesque. This poem came out of experiencing Annelyse experiencing wonder and trying my hardest to pull out of myself and join her in it.
Annelyse Gelman
Annelyse Gelman is the author of the artist’s monograph POOL (NECK Press, 2020); the EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019); and the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014). Her second book of poems Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023) was selected by Aracelis Girmay and Solmaz Sharif to receive the 2022 James Laughlin Award. She also founded and directs Midst, a digital publishing platform focused on capturing, sharing, and exploring the drafting and editing processes of contemporary poets. For more, visit annelysegelman.com.
____
Raye Hendrix is a writer and photographer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good Is Heaven, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (2024). Also the author of two chapbooks, Raye is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018). Their work appears in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and others. Raye is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon and an editor at Press Pause Press and DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press).