Another Kind of Compass (Drift, Whisper)
Christine Pacyk and Virginia Smith Rice


You’re wrong – the weather bleeds.
Yesterday, coral sores all over the ocean.
 
Still, I did what all fishermen do
when they need to sleep –
I reeled in my line, its empty hook.
 
At ten I gutted my first fish, a small pink
salmon with an eye like a silver mirror
that has forgotten its reflection, 
a glass marble, blank
paper twist at the center.
 
I slipped the knife into its opaline belly
and spilled the roe into the swell
between waves. Three bay leaves
steeped with the simmering
carcass, flesh separating from
delicate cartilage.
 
And always another run on the way,
delayed, the sea rising – still, the waves
move forward, red blooms rinsing
our bodies, birth-slick, in salt:
 
            from water you came,
to water you return.
 
Somewhere, we believe in healed, born
and reborn under a lucky sign, proving again
to ourselves we must be more than ordinary.
 
I place the kettle back on its shelf,
twist two metal rings on my fingers,
watch lightning slit open each direction.
 









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​Virginia Smith Rice is the author of the poetry collection, When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014), and a poetry chapbook, Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poems appear in The Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, and Massachusetts Review, among other journals. Collaborative poems written with Christine Pacyk appear in Jet Fuel Review, and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018.) She is poetry editor at Kettle Blue Review and associate editor at Canopic Publishing.

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Christine Pacyk is a poet and educator living in the Chicago Suburbs. She holds an MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her work has been published in Jet Fuel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crannóg Magazine, and Zone 3, among other journals. Collaborative poems written with Virginia Smith Rice appear in Jet Fuel Review, and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018.)

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