Caylin Capra-Thomas
I have come home. Where I am not remembered. Where I am remembered—falsely. The sea is miles away. Joyce called her the snotgreen sea. He was Irish, from the snotgreen isle. Once, I saw seals off the coast of Cork, where later a man would approach and ask what it was like to be talking to a drunk. A quake in his jelly-legs, unstable, unable to swim the waters he swallowed. Uncomfortable, I said, and he backed away. I’m sorry, he said. I’m sorry, denim jeans, denim jacket, denim-blue eyes wide with something like fright. The sea close, frightfully close. His nose was running—all the way, I imagine—to the salt that bore him.
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Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books). Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere, and her scholarship is forthcoming in The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she’s a PhD student in English and creative writing at Mizzou, studying nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism.