At Bay

We leave our families and your dead
name at the shore. Or, they come with us
and we’ll tread water. Or we tell them
that you are a woman. And that I
love a woman. Or we swim out
as far as we can and put our heads
under to drown. We give
all our air to sink. Bays are formed

where continental lands leave
one another, they are the space
between our mothers and us,
between our fathers and us,
between my teeth when I tell
the water and the sediment
in my lungs about the last time
we saw them,
how the seafloor spread where we lay.