Whale Road Review: Once, We Were Under the Sea

Once, We Were Under the Sea, an ode to prehistoric Florida, can be found in the Spring 2025 edition of the prestigious Whale Road Review. The edition in full is inspiringly curated – jewel-like and intoxicating. I recommend reading each piece in order with a warm cup of honeyed tea by your side. Bonus points if you do so on a gray, rain-battered afternoon from the safety of your coziest chair.

I am sharing my piece below. Click here to read the entire edition.

(Photo above of Myakka State Park by me.)

Once, We Were Under the Sea

You don’t have to dig. The teeth have eaten their way up. They lie there on the surface like strewn coins, tumbled and polished, gray gums attached. Petrified.

Florida air is a fossil. An entire universe once swam through the air I breathe. It is wet and you can taste the ancient salt. Smells of sea slugs beached on sand. It is heavy, and hopeless.

A dead weight.

I look beyond. The throbbing sun dances on the road and turns the asphalt into sea.
It shines like oil.
The mirage waves and tumbles, bits of quartz glimmer.
The tar is tacky.
It will never quite cure.

With fat magic marker lines these roads cruelly redact random sections of a vast paleolithic graveyard, its extinct sea-souls crying out to be seen, laying bare their pushed-up bodies, stamped like passports in mud, and their undying teeth.

But more than teeth. Without effort, in the dirt, you can find star-spotted coral, bleached white like what’s dying right now in the Great Barrier Reef, or the rice-paper exoskeletons of insects, copied on rock like newsprint on putty. Or the smallest of fish bones. Or so-delicate ferns—each vein to be eternally adored.

Humans burn their bodies more and more.
Please, lay me in the sea.
Build an entirely new and unimaginable world on top of me.

In forty million years a creature beyond conception will kick a rock and put my tooth in a bag and take it home and add it to its collection, a jar of ancient people-teeth, my one with fifty others of my kind. One from the mailman. One from that woman I never liked.

And in another forty million years,
a new kind of shark
will swallow the jar.