What Floats, by Tyler Thier

What the Water Gave Me, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1938.

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What Floats                                                                                                        
 
 is your frilled dress
from dance nights,
caresses in bed, distant
loved ones just visible
in the reeds, fig leaves
you left on a grave,
lopsided toy ship
your grandpa made.
 
That’s what stays,
tapping gently
into porcelain
as the water browns,
never touching the drain.
 
What sinks is charred soil,
bleeding roots, dead finch
you saved, then dropped
to the worms, microwave
fumes choking your favorite
part of the skyline, skeletons
posed for photo ops, lava
flooding postcard towns
like a strung noose, embryo
leaking from refuse--
 
all of which whirls down
through the crack in your toe,
continuing to whistle, stifled,
low, so that even as you bathe
in what’s left, you always know.

Tyler Thier

Tyler Thier is a Brooklyn-based adjunct professor and freelance film critic with previous publications in the New York Public Library Zine!, After the Pause, the Maier Museum of Art, Tuck Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review itself. Additionally, he is a performed playwright and an enthusiast of bare-bones, no-frills Irish pubs.