The Dead Sea
When I was little I asked too many questions.
I asked my mom to teach me how to swim.
I asked her why rocks don’t float.
I asked her where babies come from and why I had freckles and what grade you’re in when they teach you to spell curse words.
I asked her if the soul of the Dead Sea is in heaven or in hell.
She never answered in order.
‘Some things just don’t float, and some things don’t have a soul.’
So I paddled furiously through these questions,
Like a moth with wet wings,
Like a disposable razor dancing in the drain.
But I sank, like a knife in a sink, with no hopes to float.
Some nights I lay in bed and pray for the soul of the Dead Sea.
I put a word in for Kilimanjaro’s bi-polar kin,
I want salvation for that mineral laden maiden,
who lays like a body of water, but is just an island of loose mortar,
waiting for the silt deposits to coagulate together.
But it’s just like the perjury of drunk kids and Catholics,
we can’t purge loved ones from purgatory.
It must be lonely to be the sodium chloride sea of peace.
Just stagnant saline solution waiting to evaporate or for someone to take a dip.
Nothing can live in her,
tourism killed her,
like a broken life preserver.
Kamikaze fish sometimes swim from their freshwater homes to explore what lies beneath what they know. Pioneers destroyed for their pursuit of holiday, drink the lullaby, and die instantly from her siren salt. She coats them in brackish mother of pearl and casts them to the shore.
I found out how to spell curse words from abandoned billboards.
I learned how to swim from drowning.
I still wonder who the Dead Sea really is, if she ever felt love.
Was she Lot’s liquid wife waiting to meet her faithful partner in the afterlife?
Have not-so-buoyant boys taken stabs at sex,
realizing they were necrophiliacs?
Nothing can penetrate her.
Anything with life must stay above the surf.
But I will save the soul of the Dead Sea.
Even if she is Medusa with freshwater deltas that martyrs the lives of the unsalted.
Even if I can never penetrate her briny coverings,
And I have to lay there hovering above the surface.
I will float there, belly up, in pious levitation, praying that ascension is possible.
