Poseidon

A far-flung sky, a coast, a nape of thorns. This ocean lives two lives at once; it has a struggle in it. You

want to be thought dangerous and so you learn to swear. The kids raised here go north or they are never

happy. Weddings happen all the time but never has there been a 50^th anniversary party here. It is said that

your eyes were as blue as shallow water when they named you; they are darker than the deepest trenches

now. Your mother pays you twenty dollars to unclog the gutters. You buy a radio and lash it to a rafter in

the back shed where you spend most school days, lying in a hammock you liberated from one of the

empty summer homes your mother cleans. A girl in your home room named Sara Agnes gives you

airplane bottles of tequila and weed when she can. In exchange you pretend to be her boyfriend around

her parents, and give her rides in your stepfather’s truck, out to her real boyfriend’s trailer inland. All the

trees here are dry, scabby pines or else they are imported from somewhere else to make the town look

beachy. All the men here are either work-broken or leisure-ruddy. Both kinds wear boat shoes and keep

their shirts untucked. They love to spit into the sea. For your part, you are almost always lying wasted in

your shed. Or else you are mowing the lawns of the rental properties, listening to NOFX on your

Discman, watering their gated gardens, maintaining their private dunes. It is said that your mother named

you Poseidon when she first looked into your pools of eyes but later changed it to something sensible

when she couldn’t sleep for dreaming of your death. Knee deep on a squall day, she would find herself

facing the ocean, singing to the bundle in her arms. Then, from the deep, an improbable rip tide would

grip her, shift the sand and she’d be taken under. Your pink shape would slip free of her swaddle, would

pull out fast and fast to sea. She would invariably wake up screaming. She took some pills, then others.

She gave up coffee, gave up spicy food, and slept with one quick hand inside your crib. And still the

dream, each night, the same ending, until she changed your name to Steve and left your father.

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CHELSEA WHITTON is a poet and essayist based in Ohio, where she earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati and now teaches creative writing and literature at the Art Academy. Her poems have appeared in an array of print and online publications, including Copper Nickel, Cream City Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry Ireland. Her chapbook, Bear Trap, is published by Dancing Girl Press (2018) and her first full-length collection, The Wonder Wheel, will be published by LSU press in 2026.

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