Sian Maciejowski
Where All Seas Are the Same
I’m standing at the edge again. From inside me
comes salt, a cry, a wingbeat too soft to name.
There is no answer, only the return of morning.
Two women hover beside me—
one with the ache of milk, the other
with her hands still empty. Both are me.
A baby bird totters toward the foam,
its small feet learning risk, its mouth full of sky.
How can something so new already belong to the wind?
Behind me, the ghosts of women
who never turned back
fold their towels, smooth the air.
Aren’t all seas the same,
whether cold or kind,
each one pretending to be home?
My older self reaches,
my younger self waits,
the tide decides.
Somewhere under the bright, indifferent water,
a feather drifts through a school of light.
It could be mine.
And beyond the shore,
though glittered with wings,
the sea is quiet —
so quiet, it’s hard to believe.
Sian Maciejowski is a London-based writer and poet born in Zambia and raised in the UK. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Chestnut Review, Sky Island Journal, Gather Literary Magazine, Ink & Marrow Literary Magazine, The Poetry Lighthouse, and Femme Social. Her poem “Self-Portrait as Silence” was nominated for Best of the Net in 2025, and “Stone Fruit as a Postpartum Body” was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize.