Selkie Bride
by Molly Girard

Runestone, volume 12

All we wanted:

A single dance on the beach 

in our own company

All we wanted:

The moon to filter through our translucent skin 

and shimmer on tough scales

All we wanted:

Glacial chill gooseflesh across our arms 

So the freedom is fully felt

 

Ritualistic:

We are spontaneous, we have no rituals

Except the here and now, 

The throwing our seal skin on the rocks

Trusting our feet to find the smooth rocks in the dark

Following ocean rhyme

Knowing ourselves and not needing to know anything more

 

Men watch because they do not know this joy

And men steal because they want to capture, extract, 

To have, to have, to have

In these years I have learned:

1. Men call many strange things love because their mouths cannot form the gentle curve
needed to ask. Stay

He calls me wife when he knows my love is the sea

I am a purple-hued thistle rooted to the coastline, 

Fruit bitter as saltwater

 

One day, 

mid-January on the Moorish shore, he will stand on a rocky eclipse

His dark curls shift over striking eyes

Like a raincloud tinting the blue-sky. 

His eyes are black obsidian rock

cooled by our brittle time together

and his own false pretenses

 

He will hand me my ordinary, grey, 

silken pelt. 

Perfect, soft, subtle velvet

drapes across my arms:

his stolen static heirloom; my freedom

 

He thanks me for 

– His children [I had no want for them]

– For washing scallop-edged china for so many days
that I watched the blue paint fade in the water i was forbidden from

– For borrowing my fourth finger

– For staying [I was never allowed to leave]

The wind carries away weak and senseless words

 

I turn my sharp, angled shoulder

towards the sea.