Jewel Box

The dunes ululate in a solid way

like the ruffled rock of oyster lips.

I live in my house

like grains of sand live in a shell-mouth.

A pearl is just an idea sand had,  

rubbing its atomised body into being

against a concave container

and the peach meat at its centre.

I don’t wait for darkness

to make my transformative motions:

day or night, I chafe my grit

against walls and ledges

and rub my peach mind

against the plywood

so as to make jewels

out of my trap.

Absorption

 But in dreams I’m toothed and minced,

toothed and minced,

tongued and kissed until I am the mouth

and the mouth is me

and my edges turn into glass

which is and isn’t a border, like the skin of the sea.

The sun presses into me like a thumb

until I drop.

There is no going,

you can’t leave the place that you are.

Something speaks that through me

when I wake up into myself.

Erin Scudder is a Melbourne-based writer from Canada and New Zealand. Her poetry and essays have been published in a variety of Asia-Pacific journals and anthologies. Her short fiction was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Desperate Literature Prize and published in Eleven Stories 2021 (Desperate Literature, Madrid).