Finery

I dress you in icy cerulean waters

I dress you in wings of gurnard, flare those fingerlike pectoral rays

I dress you, eyes open, in sleek skins and milky blue pearls

               on a bed of migrating eels

I dress you in the glitter of vast skies, all the possibilities awaiting

I dress you in the opaque liquid and froth of a boiling Waiwakaiho river

I dress you in yellow thorns and fins, metallic blue backs of tuna leaving

               a corset of abandoned trolleys around your hips

               wipe slime off bottled bling             

               onyx clumps of oil wash up, nest around your feet

I dress you in lost rudders and paddles, wide belts of rust

dress you in dumped ballast and bilge

               pull the undaria tight

shoo away bryozoans, sea squirts and other molluscs

               clinging to your underskirts

Mikaela Nyman writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Swedish and English. Her latest poems appear in The Spinoff, Landfall 244, The Disappointed Housewife, RH Morrieson Literary Awards Finalists 2022, No Other Place to Stand (AUP, 2022) and Madness, an anthology of world poetry (RedPanda Books, 2023). Her second poetry collection in Swedish is forthcoming in August.