At low tide on a barren beach,
a sun-bleached dolphin skull.
Nothing left but bone.
Strewn nearby,
weathered vertebrae—
medallions,
each shaped
like a uterus with ovaries.
I slide one onto the silver
chain around my neck—
a crucifix for an old woman
with a young heart.
Relentless, the breakers roll
about like a die cupped
in the defiant fist of an aged
mariner. The dolphin’s
one-hundred teeth
scattered in the deep
like a broken strand of pearls.
Jessica D. Thompson lives in a stone house at the edge of a classified forest in Southern Indiana. Her poetry can be found in journals such as Appalachian Review, Atlanta Review, the Midwest Quarterly, Still: the Journal, and the Southern Review as well as in many anthologies, including “Women Speak, Vol. 7,” Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her first full length poetry collection, “Daybreak and Deep,” (Kelsay Books, 2022), was a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Books of 2022 for Narrative Poetry and has been nominated for the Eric Hoffer award. As part of the Lunar Codex Project, her poem entitled, “The Grandmother Who Fell from the Sky,” has been published in the Polaris Trilogy (Brick Street Poetry) scheduled to be launched in a time capsule aboard the Space X flight headed to the South Pole of the Earth’s moon in 2023.