When I was a young girl
my teacher used to tell me I was an Island.
He was a stuffy concrete home.
His flower bulb hands would swim across
the ocean of my stomach.
And when he swam
I swear he could see the coral
Inside me – all blue and green
and even golden brown
like the colour of my skin.
Until his words got too hot
and bleached my body
and so I screamed
and he looked at me,
with all the wonder in the world.
As though I was now a sinking Island
but he was an airless tin shed
who housed rotting wood with holes.
I want to decamp from
the changing climate of his hands
to catch the cool wind of the past
all those years ago
when the sea stretched out
as far as my limbs.
But now the sea leaps
at my home only metres away.