The Drift

By Dhaanvi Jaipuriar

The tide isn’t coming in; it’s a slow hemorrhage
leaking through the floorboards, a salt-crust
calcifying the mahogany until the room is a reef
of everything you’ve tried to bury.
You navigate a hallway of doors that open
into more hallways, each one tapering,
smelling of damp cedar and the ozone-stink
of a storm that refuses to break.
A sturgeon with your mother’s unblinking gaze
swims past your shoulder, its scales a flickering litany
of every forgotten address you’ve shuffled through.
This is the heavy logic of the deep:
nothing has weight until you attempt to name it.
When you reach for the handle, it liquefies—
brackish water between your knuckles.
You are not drowning; you are being translated
into the velvet grit of the dark
before the sun demands your skin back.

Dhaanvi Jaipuriar is 14 years old, and goes to William Hopkins Middle School in Fremont, California. Previously published in Eunoia Review, she lives with her parents and enjoys reading and playing tennis in her free time.