Six excerpts from the Beach

1.

 

We are going to test footprints.

What it feels like beneath our feet. Swimming.

There is one breathing pattern. Bright,

and full of white legs. We will love ourselves if nothing else insists.

A delirious dandelion asks us to swap its yellow lungs for the ability to elope.

Stumble into some sentence, peeled and sliced.

Find solace in our canal with her legs up through Persia.

Land feet in other people’s mornings.

Dunes slink.

 

 

2.

 

We pull icicles from each other’s scalp.

Some grow back. Some bury their heads in the sand.

Our disfigurement is strangely subtle. There is a moment:

the beach takes flight. Bares an ugly black throat.

Until it rained, umbrellas thought they were totem poles.

We are fifty-seven city blocks from home. The overbite is getting worse.

 

 

3.

 

Waves wash up aches and ambulances. People wake

and slice bread and die overseas too. One voice is larger than

the rest calling out the new methods of strangulation.

Guessing whose childhood was worse. A home without walls.

Water is akin to my new strand of pearls. Waves suffer

on the very wind that sustains them. Wrought with grains.

Silence stings and smarts against eyes.

You are wondering if you can be my catacomb.

 

 

4.

 

Cockles gather themselves in murmur of our awkward vibrations.

Deciding what to catch is easy, the keeping is the hard part.

 

 

5.

 

Sky, faces, your face,

business men, airplanes, the names of fruit and people

whose shadows we’ve dreamed of climbing.

There is the way for the cosmos to know itself. Wrought with grains.

I am having trouble believing that one world is more real than another.

You press the last raspberry to my lips.

The tongue is the most sentimental muscle.

 

 

6.

 

I stand timid as wishes.

Things existing, not existing, wished for.

The knowledge of sunset, of sunrise. The absence of.

Your watermelon breath.