issue four / panacea
Migration
Alicia Rebecca Myers
Viewed at night and from high above, 64,000 green sea turtles resemble floating
stars, making the Great Barrier Reef like a second firmament to the human eye.
Some of their carapaces are painted with a bright white stripe. They can’t spot this
on themselves or communicate their knowledge of another’s markings. Turtles are
short-sighted. They look up and mistake the sky for ocean. Their distant
counterparts waver back as bony light. What keeps them going, alone and in
aggregate, is believing every star to be a shell.
stars, making the Great Barrier Reef like a second firmament to the human eye.
Some of their carapaces are painted with a bright white stripe. They can’t spot this
on themselves or communicate their knowledge of another’s markings. Turtles are
short-sighted. They look up and mistake the sky for ocean. Their distant
counterparts waver back as bony light. What keeps them going, alone and in
aggregate, is believing every star to be a shell.
Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Gulf Coast. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. Her first full-length book, Warble, was recently chosen by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize (Meadowlark Press) and will be published in 2025. She lives with her husband and their nine year old in upstate NY.