| Jennavieve Strub - "someone I used to know" |
get yourself sick,
salt in your throat,
wear your family’s regret
like a weight you can't shrug off
a soaked red coat on the ferry,
wind pressing it tighter,
heavy as memory,
down to the pale sand and driftwood
where you once built castles
as you can’t remember
what is home, if not
the first place you run from?
the dock fading behind you,
the water opening ahead
puke your life out
into the wind off the strait,
into a notebook gone soft with rain
there's no rescue here,
only open wounds,
salt-stung and refusing
to scab over
don't know much about poetry,
but I know how the ocean
takes what's broken
and wears it smooth
how grief can be a tide,
pulling you under,
lungs filling with brine
and old stories
now, it's the wind,
the smell of kelp
the gull's cry circling above
grief finds me there
on the open water,
in the arms of a woman
whose face I should know
from a photograph I can't recall
a moment
I was never meant to keep
|
| Aidan Collier - "Final Sailing" |
You tumble up into my arms
To look across this wind-ruffled fingerprint
This glass house of whale song
Earthen limbed
Cloudy nest
Where all thrown, stones come to rest.
Ground down between the ocean bed and sky
As am I, as am I
Turned practical and fine
And finally running out over moon-soaked road
For just one horizon more.
But did I lift you high enough to see
Where my wake touches the shore?
|
