Some time after we split up the china,
after I moved away, I found
two honeymoon photos still stuck together.
The glossy paper ripped as I pried
the pictures apart, and there we were—
well, there you were in one, and me
in the other. We never thought
to hand our camera to a stranger.

I took that picture of you
in the cove they call Stingray City,
where a slowing boat’s propeller
calls a swarm of the silky slate creatures.
You’re forever frozen in swim trunks, your hands
flat on the wolf-sized ray, your lips
poised to plant a kiss
on her slick, thrashing wings.

The Caribbean’s milky green in the photo
of me. I’m sun-glassed,
bikini-clad, up to my white waist
in water. Laughing because
why wouldn’t I be, twisted as I am
away from the horizon, away
from the approaching hurricane,
the clouds black as Stingray City.

—

Kate Horowitz is a science writer and poet based in Washington, D.C. Her work celebrates life’s marvels and oddities, and has appeared in the Washington Post, Pitbull, Compass, and Poetica magazines, and in the book Men and Angels: The Art of James C. Christensen (Greenwich Workshop Press, 2008).