2024
5.5×8.5″
28 pages (26 poems, 12 illustrations)
Paper: $7 online or reach out if you’re local
Digital: $2.50 (email mcolvett at gmail if this is prohibitive
Set in Queens in the summer of 2021, Lionfish is the fantastic tale of a reunion and eventual romance between an Astoria health worker and his childhood friend, a sea monster who can take a human shape for brief periods on land. Through the summer, their story brings them into contact with human and non-human life along the waterfront in Astoria, Long Island City, and Jamaica Bay — communities whose fates are bound together in the environmental past, present, and future.
The ocean. There’s still, there’s always,
the ocean. Life on earth will change
within our lifetimes. What thrives
or doesn’t. What and who will be allowed
to thrive. I don’t look forward to that.
The ocean will be there, though, in some
or another phase of its life. Do you think
it suffers? I think I do, I mean I think
it does. But it’ll stay itself, some version
of itself. As long as I live, I’ll go to it.
As long as I live, it’ll receive me, it’ll know
my name among the billions. You can go there,
you know. Go whenever you need me.
To touch something I’ve touched. To see what lasts.
This project was made possible in part with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by New York Foundation for the Arts.