Alphabet of the Ocean

I follow the line of a broken shell
             as jazz steers half notes
                        marooned on saxophones

random thoughts
             breaking prime numbers

I follow the line of a broken life
             forever meeting its
                        plausible incarnations

how its spectrum travels
             into the next debris field
                        seagull sinking in sand.

Centuries later emerges
             the perfect fossil
                        of flight.

I follow the line of a broken shell
             spiraling into the arm of a nebula
                        where stardust is called into service

yourself a canyon
             of missed desire
                        or fireworks volute

full of sinuous life
             what might have jazzed
                        lost notes: aria or nova.

But the line of a broken shell
             is never finite
                        how exactly the wing

finishes, holds gold, blue, rose
             how its lost wall streams light
                        jazz bridge releasing deluge

how the girl without father
             now says love to him
                        how gone husbands

now pass onto new children
             family stories delivered
                        whole as peaches.

I follow how that broken shell
             unfurls its cape
                        like Circe

predicting a calcium future
             what might have
                        happened lucky

why I keep two
             broken shells myself:
                        one: two-thirds

indigo, dark purple whelk
             another, fist-sized arc
                        a yolky shard.

These others say
             still out in the surf
                        can be whatever we need.

isbn 1-59661-104-9
31 pages/$9

In Alphabet of the Ocean, Josie Kearns explores Jungian shadow and anima through the “white, neon mouth” of seashells like the Silver Lipped Conch. Her search is often diaphanous and painterly, allowing each shell to provide something beyond beauty, some intimation of the way humanity’s “broken shell/unfurls its cape/like Circe.” Broken or whole, Kearns’ seashells are numinous objects.
—Diane Wakoski,
author of 40 books of poetry
and recipient of the William Carlos Williams award for
Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987

    In addition to Hopwood Awards from the University of Michigan, Creative Artist Awards from the Michigan Council for the Arts, residencies at Ragdale, and the Cowden Fellowship, Josie Kearns was honored to receive the first MacLeod-Grobe Prize from Poetry Northwest.
    Her work has been anthologized in Boomer Girls, Are You Experienced? and Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (Iowa University Press), Passages North Anthology, New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry and others. Her poetry can be found in Kansas Quarterly, Moving Out, The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, and Poetry Northwest, and many others.
    She published New Numbers, a chapbook, with March Street Press and a full-length collection with the same title with New Issues Press. She also published Life After the Line, a non-fiction book, with Wayne State University Press.
    She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is former director of Genesee Literary Center and The Young Writers Academy. She is married to poet Joe Matuzak and they live in the greater Detroit area.