The Water I Come From

by Quintin Collins

Husnee Mubaarik

Say my daddy never taught me to swim. Say I saw the Atlantic, searched for humpbacks. Like bodies flung off a bow,

say they break water. Say wet. Say a flood in my basement asserts how high water will rise to kill me. Say Brandon never came home.

Say their name on the ocean floor. Say saltwater ate my ancestor’s bones. Say slave skulls slap East Coast shores in King Tides.

Say I steep in these waters. Say I never stop drowning.

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Quintin Collins (he/him) is a writer, editor, and Assistant Director of the Solstice Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Kissing Dynamite, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Homology Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. He also received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2019 and was a finalist for the 2020 Alice James Award. His first full-length collection of poems, The Dandelion Speaks of Survival, is forthcoming from Cherry Castle Publishing in 2021.