About the Feature
Manuél Sánchez. Gull.
San Juan Bay, Puerto Rico
November 22, 1900
Photo by Hiva Sharifi
the shrieks of gulls arrive unbodied
like the whoops of Taíno warriors soaring ahead
…………of their arrows.
what would they churn up from the depths with their frenzied
…………net of laughter?
your farewell gestures, your shirt’s white wrists
draw the gulls hissing to the ship’s rail, they come
…………screeching, looping and tightening.
hunger rides in the wing’s greased hinge,
the unreflecting eye swoops past your eyes.
the gull slapping the sea’s face echoes
the four-hundred-year-old clapping of a Taíno woman’s hands
…………tossed onto a heap of hands.
the gull must swallow the world’s saltwater
…………to fill the holes behind its eyes.
the gull laughs, it chokes on laughter, it turns to a shade
…………of violet
as it swerves back to the golden lagoon of home.
the laughter remains hovering over you
although your island grows dimmer
each day and when fortune finds you, the gull that returns
…………to the glimmering shore
seems a torn shirt in the wind.
About the Author
Lis Sanchez is a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship recipient and has poetry appearing or forthcoming in Grain, the Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, and The Bark. Her short stories have received Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award, Nimrod’s Editors’ Choice Award, and the Greensboro Review Award for Fiction.