Kimberly Hall

“Fossilization is a process of transformation. Diagenesis. And trace fossils are special—these impressions don’t just provide evidence of particular morphologies, they also provide evidence of particular behaviors, ranging from locomotion to nesting, communication to predation. The effects of living organisms both on the landscape and on each other. Life in the wake of life.


With this poem, I wanted to both capture that sense of transformation and provide my own evidence of a time in my life that has left its teeth in me. I wrote this piece after Donika Kelly, whose similarly-titled love poems transform the speaker and their relationships through the various guises of mythological creatures; my own creature is an impression of Ray Bradbury's lonely sea monster from "The Fog Horn," whose desperate struggles with communication and connection mirrored my own during this period so intensely.”

Love Poem: Leviathan

Kimberly Hall (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent poet and author based in Southeast Texas. She holds a master's degree in behavioral science. Her work can be found or is upcoming in publications such as Sappho's Torque, Equinox, Wild Roof Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. She is currently working on her first collection.

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

In dreams, I walk alongside the moon.

In dreams, I walk alongside the moon.

The world all tidal pool, wind wave


and salt spray. Algae blooms at our feet. Lichen and little palms

sway in the surf, and sea stars glitter in the dark like lamplight, or asteroids falling around us.


We speak only the language of cephalopods, the moon and I—the language of currents

and chromatic scales. Luminescence. Limbs iridescent in ultramarine,

all twisting and pulsing, and when I wake— when the pressure above water

chokes my lungs, the moon is gone, her shimmering membrane fossilized

and wave-weathered, a sharpened echo of itself.

What I mean to say is, love, I do not mean to make myself

a lighthouse. Skin-touch like some rocky shoreline, a needle

for fingertips and ships to thread. I do not mean to make a foghorn bellow

from the benthic deep. A shell to an ear better suited for birdsong—not this slouching,

lumbering language, this limb Lopped off and still shuddering in the mouth.

But love, there are only so many ways to regrow a tongue. So many moons.

So many waves a voice can take before it breaks.

In dreams, I walk alongside the moon.

In dreams, I walk alongside the moon.

The world all tidal pool, wind wave


and salt spray. Algae blooms at our feet. Lichen and little palms

sway in the surf, and sea stars glitter in the dark like lamplight, or asteroids falling around us.


We speak only the language of cephalopods, the moon and I—the language of currents

and chromatic scales. Luminescence. Limbs iridescent in ultramarine,

all twisting and pulsing, and when I wake— when the pressure above water

chokes my lungs, the moon is gone, her shimmering membrane fossilized

and wave-weathered, a sharpened echo of itself.

What I mean to say is, love, I do not mean to make myself

a lighthouse. Skin-touch like some rocky shoreline, a needle

for fingertips and ships to thread. I do not mean to make a foghorn bellow

from the benthic deep. A shell to an ear better suited for birdsong—not this slouching,

lumbering language, this limb Lopped off and still shuddering in the mouth.

But love, there are only so many ways to regrow a tongue. So many moons.

So many waves a voice can take before it breaks.

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