Protest
Nur’aishah Shafiq
Dolphins walk among us, translucent
with suicide. We watch them shuffle past
in all their gleaming dead-eyed glory, sea slipping from their skins until our shoes are eaten through. So many ruined
Nikes and Manalo Blahniks and red-bellied Louboutins. I want to laugh, a veteran in my splattered saline-proof
wellingtons. But I was just as proud
my first time, when the turtles came to die
and I wept the morning after, scrubbing them from my trouser hems. By dawn,
the dolphins too will be gone, but now,
their glowstick organs do not yet flicker, do not yet litter pavements,
lungs tracheas diaphragms bleeding ocean into our socks. Still, people are beginning to squirm.
It’s not the nicest feeling, yes,
the wet warmth of it all but no one leaves. The dolphins march, a tide
of phosphorescence melting
beneath the shadow of skyscrapers.
When it’s all over, and the last of the crowd
return to their beds, I kneel down on the empty, wet pavement to taste the salt.
51
