She was a profound thing, a thing
of no teeth, all salt.
She lapped, never bit, with her erode clad gums
nibbling at my arms in slow-tide licks.
A clam. A bud of a hyacinth.
I dwelled in her clasp, for I was famished.
And the famished is indelibly
open-mouthed, ever for the forged, for the
mould, should it adhere to the mere bone.
And then, I was a blemish-clad body.
I was a shoreline, carved soft.
She nested like seaweed in the tender,
marooned spots about my form,
a crippled feel to the tide line
of my appeal. The appeal: gnawed, salt-creased,
washed beneath the coddle of the damp sea.
Long precedented.
I was the spit-out, the chewed cud of the deep.
Swollen. Clotted. A darling of the undertow.
She was the ocean’s clothed blade, sliding soft down my throat.
I was surrendered. cluttered.

I was the sea’s wretched beloved.
She was the sea stilled by the names of the women before me.

Abish Qamar is from Pakistan, currently an undergraduate student at Middle East Technical University, where she studies by daylight and writes in the stolen minutes and sleepless margins of it. Reading and writing have been her flesh and marrow for as far as her memory stretches. And when she's not bound by either, you’ll find her gathering rocks from the odd edges of the road.