I want us Kodaks in the salt spray
off Cape Cod’s hook. With them, of course.
Lungs crackling, bones worm-holed.
Two pipers dance on driftwood,
their skeletons to be polished wood or stone.
Such feeble whirligigs, spun by a fractious wind.
I want us cosseted below deck,
captained in hammocks and dreams.
The hounds translate to dogfish, no more smog-
colored irises, beseeching paws.
Our ship trawls the Eastern coast,
Verne’s giant squid feeding, a monstrous hypothetical.
We could call it Death.
What’s invisibly certain and with that, not particular.
There’s a book of indestructible matter
in which we are all named,
snail feet embedded in sand,
negatives curling up on some implacable bonfire.
Tossing our chained hearts overboard to the jet-black sea,
our very monsters are tangled in a starry net.
Carol Alexander is co-editor of the award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. She is the author of the poetry collections Blue Vivarium, Fever and Bone, Environments, and Habitat Lost. Her poems appear in About Place Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Common, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Mudlark, Narrative Northeast, New World Writing Quarterly, One, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Third Wednesday, Verdad, Verse Daily, and other admired print and online journals.
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