In another life, I am kelp

In Korea it is custom to drink seaweed

soup on your birthday: life in a soup.

We drink it perhaps because seaweed

gives us longevity, the sea being so great

even its weeds are precious to us.

In the Creme de La Mer factory, they play

music for their developing kelp creams.

In my dreams I am cream particles

dancing to music: sounds of feet

on sand & falling waves & life & love

& other human things kelp

do not understand.

Perhaps I was meant to be born kelp:

meant to belong somewhere the bottom

most producers are special: sparkling,

wavering glassy underneath thin surfaces,

simple & beautiful, breathing water like wine.

I wonder what life would be like had I

been born a month early. That would mean

seaweed soup, longevity soup, life soup would come

a moon earlier: the taste of salt on my teeth

crooked & rushed like the life

I was never meant to live.

When I do not finish the soup on my birthday

my mother says I am wasting life down the drain.

She begs me to at least eat the beef chunks

but I have no respect for dead things

in my life soup. She does not know I am trying

to return to a world that has lost me with feet:

the sea. Somehow I know it is hungry for me,

waiting to smother my voice with the cold.

Somehow I know

I am another kelp’s homesick child.

I am walking towards the deep because I am meant

to be there: dying & living, mother-wanting,

destined to belong

to someone else’s longevity.