Ponyo (2008) Dreams in Tectonic Scales

S— this is how we learn to recognize touch: 
watching the spring tide lick around 
a country’s most vulnerable flank,  
the moon’s image        overlapping the sun 
like a dirty thumbprint    left in June.   
I understand osmosis. What it means 
to be permeable. To let everything enter        & enter 
the open passage of my mouth 
until cilia tickles   its roof. 
My mother tells me      I have confused 
saturation with desire.      That she knows I dream    
about the translucent legs of jellyfish darkening 
to wet girl hair.      In this film’s final arc, 
the moon turns          orbitless, falls out of the sky             
like a pinball     in a slot machine.                  
I move under the buckled crests  
in a vocabulary of catastrophe.     I want nothing more
than the hands to open & close 
around everything I adore: my silver bracelet, animal         
heart. I want to touch the thin film             
separating every body      of water
         from its sky.     To witness, for once,       
what sparks the electrons’    gentle repulse.

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Sarah Lao (@sarahclao) is a Chinese American writer from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the editor-in-chief of EX/POST, and her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in AGNI, Narrative, and Black Warrior Review, among others. She will be attending Harvard College in the fall.