“You’ll be the rhythm and I’ll be the beat
You’ll be the rhythm and I’ll be the beat
Then I’ll be the rhythm and you’ll be the beat
And love, the shoreline, where you and I meet”
~Lykke Li, Melodies & Desires

A Selkie declines the dance

by Amoret BriarRose

I learned well from my sisters still blazing
these waters with eyes burning from salt
for those stone-colored bone princes,
forever blinking and awake
in their grey-green beds;
and those too, whose flames
having dimmed to small candles
standing still silent on ledges, eyes locked with the waves.
Desire will dare you to skulk and steal and bury my soul
skin bare, preferring my feet shaking the rocks, lungs
out of their depths in the shallows.
Temptation will tell me to drag, and to drown.
Waves are not content with kissing the breakwater
when the shoreline is calling, a surrender…