Goosewing
by Amra Brooks
Sui Park, Relation, 30 lb. monofilament, 7.5 x 7.5 x 5 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
GOOSEWING
Amra Brooks | NOV 2022 | Issue 20
Right in the center of my palm and smoother than a tooth. Cold and wet I feel its weight. Rub my thumb over it to feel its softness. This stone is moon white and egg-shaped. When my grandmother was alive, she would comb the shore for hours collecting shells, hunched over, her gaze on the sand, filling her bucket. I do the same with my kid, only we have no bucket and it’s rocks, not shells. Our pockets full. I pick up white oval ones and black ones with white stripes that circle them like belts. This beach is a Piping Plover preserve with dune grass and rosa rugosa lining its edges. Quicksand Pond used to spill out into the Atlantic before the drought. The thin strip of beach is shaped like a wing. It’s different from the shoreline I grew up with, where redwoods inched up to the cliffs and monarchs filled nearby eucalyptus groves. There were seals and otters and the dark blue sea. Here, we don’t see the sun disappear over the water and look for the flash of green. We’ve seen one seal here, a round silver baby. They seemed lost and friendly and eventually made their own way back into the break. I’ve come to love this place even if I miss the smell of those trees mixed with the Pacific salt air and kelp. We go late in the afternoon, try to stay for the moon rise, to see the world silver and pinking. We pack tinned grape leaves and tomato sandwiches and watermelon and eat them with the windblown grit in our teeth.
It takes me a long time to wade in, my mid-section the hardest part to submerge. My body clenches each time a wave breaks and I’m splashed on the small of my back and chest. But once I am through the break and I’ve plunged, I want time to stop. I feel the most at home where the water meets the sky and I’m weightless. It’s good to go back to the womb. I can stop hating my body here. I’m held like no person can hold me. Water isn’t just symbolic.
When the pandemic started, this beach was only open to residents and we would park a mile up the road at a friend's house and hike in. Every Monday. To get away from our small contained life. It’s always hell to get out of the house with a kid. Nets and fishing poles and boogie boards and sunscreen and snacks and goggles and chips and gummy things. Single file down the road weighted down with packs and buckets. Sometimes we were the only ones there and it felt like a secret wild gift. I loved not having to share. There are large rocks near the parking area, also smooth. Round or oval. Peachy and white and dotted with inky blacks and browns. I put more than I can believe in our trunk. I steal these to line my garden beds. I feel guilty about it because there is a sign that tells you not to, but not guilty enough to stop using them to make boundaries for my nasturtiums and California poppies that remind me I’m home.
I’ve seen photos of me in Arcata, where I was born, marching through the fog in my winter hat and coat, a naked plastic doll with brunette curls dangling from my chubby fingers. The wet sand a mirror beneath my red rubber boots. Or some with my grandmother in the sand in Florida, my hair white-blonde, my suit skirted. I remember washing the tar off our feet with oil in the showers after swimming, long days on the shore under the umbrella with cheese and tomato sandwiches that were warm from the sun and wrapped in foil. Jellyfish shrinking on the hot sand. After school in Santa Cruz, I watched my classmates surf at Steamers Lane as I rode my bike along West Cliff Drive. I saw the waves in their rolling sets, smelling the salty wet air and fermenting seaweed. The fog would enshroud the bay in a hazy hush.
The ocean regulates me. Sets me to its tides. Asks me to surrender to its vastness, holds my body when I enter it without letting go. I remember a day at Point Dume in Malibu with friends, a big swell, but a gentle crash. We all got in and did butchered water ballet, laughing hard enough to choke. A pod of dolphins passed right next to us, my whole face a smile. A moment I try to get back. The week we moved to Rhode Island, a heat wave, me pregnant, our apartment uninhabitable because of the chemicals used to refinish the floors — we escaped to Little Compton. Waves like those Point Dume waves. The Atlantic was oddly warm in this wing shaped inlet, me floating in the dark blue mother like my son was floating inside me felt like the most right thing I could know.
Last August, I went to the National Seashore alone. It was my first time away from my son for a whole week in his eight years. He had spent the year at home doing second grade online while my husband and I tried to work. The water was clear and a warm, silky calm at Herring Cove. No waves. I floated and I wondered why things that felt this good felt unreal to me. Nature magic should be the most real thing. I would get out, dry off in the sun, and then have to go right back in so I could hold onto it. Later in the evening, my back on the sand, I watched the Perseids draw lines with their effervescent tails across the sky and it was the kind of real I want to feel more of. Stars dying into the black mercurial sea. Sprinkles of light right up to the horizon line. Charged with their glow, I didn’t sleep that night.
What can I even tell an ocean lover about its waters? I know that when I get there, no matter how awful the leaving, driving, arriving is, that the grief in me will shift. I will feel a part of something bigger than what we’ve lost or are afraid of losing. I like things that make my body feel small, that remind me of how much there is that I don’t know. Black holes, the Mariana Trench, the midnight zone. That kind of uncertainty settles me. It’s there. Waiting to hold you.
Amra Brooks was born and raised in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California. Her autobiographical novella California was published by Teenage Teardrops in 2008. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Inventory, Printeresting, Ping Pong: A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, Entropy, This Long Century, index, the LA Weekly, The Encyclopedia Project, and other publications. She is the director of The Raymo Literary Series and co-produces and edits The Electro-Library Podcast. She has taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and San Diego, and Muhlenberg College. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at Stonehill College in Easton, MA where she is an Associate Professor. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction called Your Beginning and Your End and early excerpts can be found in Entropy Magazine and on This Long Century. Currently she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her family and spends New England winters dreaming of warm afternoons at the ocean, the color green, and ripe tomatoes.
Sui Park is a New York-based artist born in Seoul, Korea. Her work involves creating 3-dimensional flexible organic forms of a comfortable ambiance that are yet dynamic and possibly mystical or illusionary. Park has had several solo exhibitions and public art commissions including Immersion in Black and White at Sapar Contemporary in 2021. She has participated in over 130 exhibitions internationally. Park’s artwork has been acquired by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon and the Saks Fifth Avenue Flagship Store in New York. Numerous mentions of her work and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Vice and Colossal, as well as other publications. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary in New York City. Sui Park’s education includes an MDes in Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Environmental Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sui Park also holds an MFA and BFA in Fiber Arts at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.