Anke-Biters By Taya Boyles

A boy held my breath

in the deep end 30 days before my twelfth 

birthday. When I resurfaced 

I thought of myself as a water witch

after his swimming lessons, a propulsor,

above my time and age. 

Reckoning I could dance on water.

My childhood nickname was "Ariel"

I was a water birth,

who never lost my voice

but grew legs at 11.

If those boardwalk stares were any

indication, I had quite

the pair.

We finished our flask before the cocktail hour,

and by the garter toss, we stumbled onto

the beach, into the crashing waves.

Suddenly ravenous didn't seem appropriate

to describe newlyweds.

We were always moving, falling downstream, falling into each other.

I call his name when an ankle-biter 

goes for my father,

stopping his tires in their tracks

and spitting him back onto the concrete

in a cul-de-sac, I still avoid.

I still say time ripped out his spine and his brain

never blaming the hunter-orange Jansport

carrying Fireball and Dasani bottles,

with holes burned out the lids,

before everything starts to leak through the tear

always bigger than the last time,

and out it flows like water through open hands.

I try to hold on to carry it, you, me, my father, my sobriety,

and not wish for a rewind, where we are all back on the sand,

sun-drunk and drunk drunk,

where everything that fell was 

good enough for the ground.

Taya Boyles is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia. She is currently a senior pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Taya's writing journey started at just eight years old and has come a long way from misspelling glue. Since then, her poetry and flash fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Split Lip Magazine, Vermillion, Pwatem, Hot Pot Magazine, Radical Zine, and more.  

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