Submergence
Enter the ocean in only a crown -fronds over freckles, forgetting round. Cast yourself in as its slickness, salt surrounds, seeps deep in your skin - soul exalting as submergence sets in. What drowns upon sand will in seawater rise. Wet Eucharist you swallow, surprised, resurrection and vivisection of brain. The loneliest body, amputated its pain, descends past depths humans explain, in children's stories of sunken ships, mermaids, women seal-skinned. To mundanity, born; in mystery, end. Wet lips find gilled girls, some with a tail; you have to go deep in your fairytale. Sonnet notes from Kristin: I just wrote this final Girlarium sonnet in which my main character the Gilda, the gilled girl, makes her way from the oppressive male characters who have defined her to the ocean. She feared the ocean too because it represented the unknown which is often scarier than what we do know. But now that the patriarchy has pushed her so far she knows the safest place for her is to be free. She's always had a mermaid inferiority-complex - there is a sonnet about that I published earlier and felt like she is like them but doesn't have a tale and the fairytale romantic hype. It's only when she gets into the ocean though and eventually finds gilled girls and even mermaids and finally be romantic in the way she desires that she realizes fairytales are real. For her to find this one, she had to go deep. Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of a short story collection You Don’t Want This ( Pink Plastic Press) and The Stakes (Really Serious Literature) and many more. She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety. [Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website http://kristingarth.com] Sonnet Poetry: The Blade by Kristin Garth A Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Kristin Garth Treealabra by Kristin Garth in Fevers of the Mind Issue 1 (2019)
Fevers of the Mind 
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