“This poem began when I remembered a previous partner making it clear how much they disliked my body. Feeling angry, I wanted to break them down into parts, harmless. Later, I thought of Ozeki’s description of life as a wave: now here, now not, but always part of the same vast ocean. Then I got this image of me waist-deep in water, building my baby self out of wet sand, and I realized how much better it was when this poem was about me finding my own journey extraordinary.”
Ale de Luis was born upside-down, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, in a small town in Ontario, Canada. She resolves her clearly tenuous attachment to existence by writing whenever she can. She currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and you can find her work in Amberflora, The Selkie, and others.
