In long-ago day
we crawled out
of the sea, sister.
I stood upright,
configured a hand
arched a foot
and ran.
You stayed beast,
grew a spiked tail
slit your eyes to sit
above a double line
of impossible teeth
regal in the silk star
night of black water
indifferent as cat
or queen on land.
Dreamed into life
by the sea, she’ll have
us back one day.
Bits of salt, sister.
Zoey Brookshire lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her poetic work was recently chosen for inclusion in The Yale Review. This year she was a finalist for the 2024 Wesleyan Cardinal Poetry Prize.
Also a painter, Brookshire has received a South Carolina Fellowship in Visual Arts and has a 45 year work history that includes 22 solo exhibitions. Poems that were part of artist’s statements during these years eventually became self-sufficient. She began submitting these for publication only recently.
Her work as both painter and poet is informed primarily, but not exclusively, by the landscape. In addition to the mountain landscape she is fortunate to inhabit, the South Carolina coast has also been an ongoing source of inspiration in both painting and poetry.
