Self-Portrait as Wife of a Swamp Boat Tour Guide
Adriana Beltrano
Adriana Beltrano is a poet from Jupiter, Florida. She is pursuing her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a managing editor of the Hopkins Review and a reader for Only Poems. She was a 2024-25 Jake Adam York Prize finalist and was selected by Diane Seuss as an honorable mention for the 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her work is forthcoming or can be found in Passages North, Baltimore Review, and HAD.
I fear the dull aftermath.
I don’t kill myself—I fill my life
with eccentricity, odds and ends,
the retracting jaws of fish,
the leather suits of human skin,
the men who ride airboats like chariots.
And when he lays those clubbed nails
on my swamp-lily flesh, then, and only then,
do I see heaven. I’ve seen the dried husks
of animals. I’ve bought pickled things
in little tubes and I’ve shaken
until they’ve disintegrated;
to slough or to wither, I’ve sounded
like a braying mule while cumming upside down,
my head in my own pillows.
I like him old. Salt-stripped and wind-torn.
Fried to raisin, the sun a shuriken slicing
the lines in his face.
We met on his airboat. July.
I wore black down to my unshaven knees.
He gave me his camo,
and when the swamp backsplashed
on the deck and kissed my legs,
he bent down with a rag and dried me off.
I’ve seen dead gators in the undertow,
bobbed aside by a paddle
like a witch’s dried newt.
It’s the way a man takes a woman
named anything and makes her his own.
It’s house and hearth;
if the limestone is damp when you lay it,
it’ll never not be. When I hold him
in my mouth, I think of it decaying
in his grave. I know how these things go.