October 22nd, 2025
Water, Wait
Pretty boy, can’t you show me nothing but your open palm
the nape of your neck,
a little fingertip ripple on still water.
Pretty boy you talk too much
and when you talk I’m crazy
When you talk I’m a racecar driver and when you talk
it’s like that dream where I’m falling
out of the dark and empty.
I was cut quick from my mother
and into the world in the mid-January
bluster, six weeks preceding a late February
flood. A boy teaches me the word
antediluvian and after the flood
I watch myself weep for nothing.
My mother says I was born in blue light and serenity.
Maggie says she fell in love with a color and
Joni sketched her lover’s face onto a map
by blue TV light. WBUR tells me
that they’ve found a new blue pigment.
I flatten blueberries on the page
and bruise easy and cut squares from the sky
like I’m making a quilt
I make a mess and say who did this and don’t look
I search for texture
for a ruffle or a ribbon
just something I can work with.
Can’t you show me nothing but surrender?
I’ve got a dagger mouth and keys closed between knuckles
Sometimes I hear your footsteps louder than my own.
Sometimes I think I first knew it
when I saw Danes and DiCaprio at the banquet
locking eyes across a fish tank
the urge to say mine mine mine
of a watery beast is a hopeless thing
wanting to pull a boy out of a pool
wanting to jar the air at a party
electricity before we called it that
I craved
my lava lamp stomach
swooped in.
The first snow always reminds me
of the night I heard a rumble-voice shout “YOU’RE FAT”
and my feet, two short airborne moments splayed out on ice
my lips blue & my cheeks hot.
Pretty boy, can’t you show me nothing but surrender?
Toss our white flag t shirts in a heap
the way they fall, the blue in that.
Maria Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared in Gunk and The Michigan Daily. She hosts Reading 101, a quarterly reading series at Nightclub 101 in NYC.