Read a Poem

View as PDF

Seven of Seiche

by Kelly Hambly

I can’t stop saying the word seiche.
It looks like saytch but sounds like saysh
like the shhhhush of distant night traffic.

Lake Erie seiched earlier this summer,
waves merged as great apexes and nodes
pushing the water far beyond one shore
as if its bowl had tilted and then slowly
over seven hours, like ocean tide, turned.

My life seiche was a seven-year itch,
a disturbance of the skin like mosquito bites
a surface tension, a constant irritation
of unmet needs creating waves that caused
my marriage container to tilt and spill us out.

Seven minutes in heaven, two bodies
nervous in the laundry room while
the rest of the party sits in a circle
counting on a Micky Mouse Swatch
with a damp yellow jelly wrist band.

Seven Times the Sun a Waldorf book
of seasonal prayers and rituals
for families unsure of how tides work
and seven is an optimal prime number
that can’t be expressed as the product
of two smaller natural numbers.

Is a wife, a husband, natural – is a family,
in the end, only that which stays together.
Seven times the habits of highly effective people
seven days in the week, colors in the rainbow
notes on the diatonic scale, continents, chakras.

The average human mind retains, at most,
seven things at once, but how many phone
numbers do any of us really know by heart.

The series 697-8737 can’t spin seven digits
through time to ring that hard-wired line,
attached to my mother’s yellow kitchen wall
and warn me of the tides I must learn to ride.

Seven stages of grief, spots on Ladybug’s wings
seven neck bones in more mammals than not,
and celestial bodies visible to our naked eye.

I’m scanning the day’s surface for wave patterns
that push against me as I move through his town
feel my container, my bowl, tilting, tilting, tilting.

If I’m in the cold water when the seiche begins
and watch the tide recede from some other shore
I wonder if it will it be by chance or by design.

Seven of Seiche by Kelly Hambly. 2024. Used by permission of the author.

About the Author

Kelly Hambly is a New Englander living in Kent, Ohio, where she writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction when she is not churning out marketing and advertising copy for clients across the United States. Her writing has appeared in Decade’s Review, Olney Magazine, Unlost Journal, and the anthology How Running Changed My Life. Find her on Instagram @kellyjhambly.

Write a Poem

A Tautogram is a poem in which every word begins with the same letter or sound—sort of like alliteration on steroids. Write a tautogram of at least six lines.