Flower Conroy
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Nudibranchs
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Mostly harmless mermaid ghost. I fragment at your clown
marigold dancer sea rabbit florescence, flounder at your
dragon. Digit-backed jentacular carnival sushi swimming
through abstraction. As if the microscopic world were
magnified & drowned such,& therefore what movement
into intimacy. My wife & I are going to the sea. I’m sizzling
for Eden of pineapple rings, bedroom shipwreck,
footprints in space—so I’m packing books & bathing suits,
capes & toys, spiked slippers & a bit of the unknown.
Fingertips of mathematics paralleling along a cenotes’
mouthroof. I want her to spread me marmalade then toast
me. Exhausted beyond crawl, the brain lubricant,
firecrackered in dopamine, oxytocin, I want me tongue-
tied. Museum doors soon closing away the naked gill
marbles. Leaf sheep Bubble snail Feathered anus. Emptied
shell. Lost in the depths I want to confuse body of water
with body of water. Unaccustomed as they’ll’ve become to
solid ground my knees might sinkhole under the water
column of the showerhead. Internal rocking tethering me.
Substrate of floating feeling. Déjà vu a hair before the
recognition. I might return sunburned tailbone. I might
come back electric eel

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LGBTQ+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin and Greenest Grass (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2023). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere.