If I cannot be your shine, your floating thing,
let me be your loricate, sea cradle,
fastened to the belly of your rock. I can
live in the saltiest of your waters. I will
sing you songs of the days when all the world
was ocean, and moon our only mistress.
If you will not let my scarlet mantle
cover you, your want; anchor you, your drift;
if you must follow the tides as they pull
away, ride the gyre to colder waters,
thick with krill and shrimp and sharks, think of me
in this tidal pool beside this sea-worn glass.

–Jeremy Paden,
Broken Tulips (2013)
Accents Publishing

More posts about Jeremy Paden:

• An Interview with Jeremy Paden
• Writing Challenge: “Discarded Ideas & Revised Beliefs”
• “The Idea of Land” by Jeremy Paden
• “I was Stone, You Were Water” by Jeremy Paden
• “Honey and Wormwood” by Jeremy Paden

Jeremy Dae Paden was born in Italy and raised in Central America and the Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Emory. His poems have appeared in such places as the Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Louisville Review, Naugatuck River Review, pluck! and Rattle, among other journals and anthologies. This is his first published collection of poems. He is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and a member of the Affrilachian Poets.