/geula geurts

Self-Portrait as Pregnant Bride

only yesterday I stood before the pulse of ocean filling the beach with debris & shells, the glass bottle of my old life smacking against an ancient skull. ah love, look

at the cracks, the waters prism through the rocks we built & inside the oyster of my body, see

you planted a disruption, an incantation in the dark dew, coated with layers of forever

surging under a canopy of promise.

i want that pearl now

to cut it from the clam dress i squeezed into to cut it & hang it from my neck,

to give myself to the endless seabed, the treasure of our flesh.

Geula Geurts is a Dutch born poet and essayist living in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Shaindy Rudolph Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Her mini chapbook ‘Like Any Good Daughter’ was published by Platypus Press. She was named a finalist in the 2018 Autumn House Chapbook Contest, and a semifinalist in the 2020 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Penn Review, Juked, Blood Orange Review, New South and SWIMM among others. She works as a literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency.