Featured Poem • November 2017
Backswamp Atlantis
Alix Bosley
It’s sinking slowly, they say, into mud and water and deeper water. Another fifty years and this will all be under, even the wooden stilt-houses perched on their egret legs will be sunken beneath, mired in too much muck and sludge. It doesn’t matter, we tell them. We’ll grow gills and our skin will slough off to reveal the green scales that have always been underneath. We’ll tear away the sticky flesh and become a new species—not quite man, not quite beast. We will learn to breathe saltwater. We will sharpen our teeth and our eyes will get used to the gray glass of the marsh waters. In the summer we will climb up the receding banks and bask in the too-hot sun, our bellies buried against the silt. It will not be the same. It will not be home, but our memories are here and so many ghosts still wade through the brackish water reminding us we cannot leave.
Alix Bosley currently lives with her husband and their two small exuberant humans in southern Louisiana. She was born there and will probably die there too. She hasn’t yet decided how she will manage her time as a ghost, but as a living entity she spends most of her days writing poetry and fiction while obsessing over various fantasy worlds and lost civilizations. She has previously been published by Liminality and Figroot Press.
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