by Cara Waterfall
The body solves itself sideways—
through the failure of edges.
It keeps no allegiance to shape—
skin calibrates by abrasion:
reef-scar, tide-rust, suction—
the drag-memory of passing things.
Scallop-grooved suckers
mouth the world before believing in it.
One globed eye opens late—crepuscular; the other bruises inward.
A bloom. A decoy—
pseudomorph, pressure-cloud.
The form still visible.
My father trusted containment.
In the drawer: glass, stoppered—
ink kept in lampblack throats.
He lined them in rows.
Indigo. Sepia. Iron-gall.
He drew the page close,
ink gathering where thought stalled.
Anything more tender than the beak can be left.
Surviving by siphon. Touch closes me.
I narrow—misremember my edges.
A jar insists on an outline. I don’t.
Arms arrive before thought: eight local intelligences.
Nothing agrees on what was here—
only that something answered by not being there.
He made marks that stayed;
I make a dark that won’t settle.
Cara Waterfall is a Canadian poet and storyteller whose work draws on her experiences in Côte d’Ivoire and across the francophone world to explore language, migration, memory, and belonging. She is the author of Radiant Wound (Unsolicited Press, 2025) and The Lost Stations (Ink & Ribbon Press, November 2026). Her poetry appears in Best Canadian Poetry, Room, The Night Heron Barks, and The Ekphrastic Review. She won Room’s Poetry and Short Forms contests, and was also shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. She writes Archipel, a newsletter exploring poetry, language, and creative community, and is the founder of the Donald E. Waterfall Scholarship, which supports emerging poets through financial support and sustained creative mentorship.