I combed the beach at the end of my childhood
street, searching for rocks and shells and broken sea
glass smoothed by the longest tumbles in the roaring
sound. Across, a long island that I starved at for years
where I did not know you dwelled. I starved.
I starved. I starved with ache. I asked the sky
to grant me please for what I did not know
my body craved. I asked our bifurcated skies
to send me a signal—anything the lighthouse could spare
to illuminate, anything that could bring me to the stranger.
Anything.
I was not yet a sailor. I was not yet a boat.
I was not yet a discoverer of your body’s pleasures.
the deep-sea diver of your eyes.
To map you is not to own you. Where my hands will land
on your shores restores a holy place. There
and there and there and again. I already know this
before I am named a cartographer. I already know
before I set sail on your temperamental ocean,
before I storm you at the island’s head,
before I can truly know how my parched fingers will feel
to your skin, to where my palms will find
their grace, to where my lips will seek their softest
landings, before all this time is written down
in the ship’s night log to improve that we were here.
And I will practice touch on the surfaces of daily things:
Lampposts in candelabra light. Combination locks. Rearview
mirrors. Where you grant me any entry is a fierce harbor.
Every vein travelled, a river. Every hill also a valley
where every word that language knows for circumnavigation
leaves out another yet undiscovered. We will find them.
Unabashed. We will find them. Unadorned.
We will find them undetermined because this is
your body and your body defining mine.
And now there is a now where a future once waited.
And now there is a now that was forever you.
link to video
Sandra Yannone is the author of the just-released chapbook, Fire at the Big Top (MoonPath Press 2026), Boats for Women (Salmon 2019), and The Glass Studio (Salmon 2024). In April she toured Ireland as the co-editor of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic (Salmon 2026). Recent poems appear in Booth, Lavender Review, Skylight 47, and the audio anthology, One Minute Poems. She hosts the international online series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry and is the poet laureate of Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
