That summer in Costa Rica,
you laughed at my straggling braids,
ratted with beads and broken strands,
henna woven up my arms
like poetry we couldn’t read.
You asked when I planned to cut them off.
The Caribbean was as warm,
as the beer in your hand, the rum in my veins,
all August and into September.
At night, when we’d tangle in the sand,
limbs and angles snagged against each other,
I’d imagine us floating
like the moon, or cranberries in a bog,
or an oil slick creeping towards shore.
Jennifer deBie is a native Texan living in Cork, Ireland where she earned an MA in Creative Writing in 2017 and a PhD on Mary Shelley in 2021. She has been widely published with creative and critical work appearing in anthologies by Raven Chronicles Press, PactPress, and Bloomsbury, which neither impresses her cat nor pays her rent. Her first novel was published in 2020, her second novel Heretic, was just released by Wild Wolf Press. When not reading, writing, or teaching her seminar on plague literature, Jennifer enjoys typical millennial pastimes like eating brunch and neglecting her blog at jenniferdebie.com