If you’ve ever sailt, you know that the salt air on a particularly hard day will lift your lunch out of you, robbing you of everything
It will force you to give up what feeds you return it to the world from whence it came
It will turn your once soft and loving belly into a voided chinoiserie urn
It will turn your sweet self into chunks that hit the air—and leave you
like the seagulls do as they rise and return, rise and return
eager for their slice
eager to really know you
you swear
Emily Tristan Jones was born in the Northwest Territories. Her poems have appeared in The Puritan, Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Vallum, and several other journals. She holds a graduate degree in the visual arts from the University of Chicago (a winner of its emerging writers series). She lives in Montréal where she teaches poetry for the QWF and coordinates Columba, an online poetry quarterly.