Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet with eleven collections. Queen Palm (Valley Press U.K 2023) is her latest. She is published internationally in journals such as Edinburgh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Salzburg Review, Agenda, The Fiddlehead, The Caribbean Writer, PREE. She has an M.Litt. in Creative Writing from Univ. of Glasgow, is a MacDowell Fellow, and Bermuda Arts Council Grant recipient.

Limestone Houses

I stared into the orange,
felt the hue substantial,
could hold a house in
place, was solid even

as hurricane rain washed
over it. The skink lizard
clinging to the wall with
dewlap open, orange paint

squeezed from a tube.
When I saw the Rothko
Room at the Tate, I
was already prepared

by years, orange, pink,
yellow had sheltered
and held me as the white
roof of slabbed stairs

climbed into a blue sky
sea, triangled at a peak
like the one an ancestor’s
ship disappeared into.

Bermudians took local
limestone to build bright
homes in Charleston,
a ballast in the ship to

negotiate waves of change.
The chalkiness of its stature,
like pastels crumbling.
The softness of Aeolianite,

like pink coral sands
the tide removes, replenishes,
Bermudians hold in hands,
allow to sift through fingers.

Pink Tangle Teezer

Like a rose sun coral, nodules waft a watery aqua sky,
deep down in the semitropical ocean of her youth.

A pink floral Octocorallia with tentacles swaying
in the waves of her breezy hair. A cow’s udders

dropping the doze of the mother country’s
milk into her body as it exfoliates her scalp.

Placed on the side of her daily bath, like
a set of extra teeth, ones sluggish on a slug’s

tongue, words emitted slowly, rubbery and
bent. The slush, slur of an infant’s speech, not

enunciated but dissolving in her mouth, a lozenge
sucked for the taste of the island’s sweetness.

Sea Squid

Capped like a nursery bonnet
with tentacles streaming ties.

A missing tooth of the sea,
roots wavy white as floss.

Like a molar left under
the waves puffed, frilly pillow.

Moon Jelly

Lacey as doilies for tea cups,
a soft sense of politeness present

when the sea harmonized itself
in daily turnings. Sand dollar like,

the sifting of tides that come
with a cost, crash down hard

against the fibers of brittle shells.
Mushroom shaped as if from

Paget Marsh pickings, like a nuclear
blast implodes marine’s depths.

The rise of it, the setting, luminous
with ocean’s see-through quiverings.

Humpback Whale

You need a hump to
be in tune with a curvy
ocean, to rise like one in
Notre Dame’s cathedral.

You need a hump to let
the ocean somersault a blub-
bery body, keep weight out of
the traffic of lighter species.

You need a hump to sing
the depth’s mutterings, let it
roll over, course off from
a large wagging tongue.

Coccoloba Uvifera

Like a scrotum full of seed,
the cluster of bay grapes
hang down on a semitropical

sandy beach. Wind-tide
nurtured, pink blueish as
any human flesh bruised,

it has come to us from
tropical storm thrashings.
Here, the leaves, green plates

to eat from, I take nature’s
servings. Sweetness
around a seed hard centre,

used for a game of marbles,
a ring around planets I draw
into seaside sand days. Trunk

shaped berries, veiny leaves
like elephant ears, a herd
stampedes my memory bank.