White Caps Spilt to Sea

by E. Briskin

If the sun moved, curved aspects would resolve thingness differently. To be the shadow itself would be simpler.

Lying there lying there there in the ocean
salt-thinking wave sifting paper squaring sand.

The soprano, forgotten, sang white strips of quartz.

I expanded like ice.

The rock dropped each time and each time the rock dropped the rock rhymed with the sound of rock dropping.

Or contracted like fucking.

Busted tin in loose dirt smells of cut-crumbled stone, of the lie beneath each re-built city.

I contracted like
gulls.

If the truth is a tempest, let the weathervane squeal.

What is fucking?

She graphed you.

Fucking steel.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A stone, a stone the most obvious one

It began when beginning was unavoidable and continued until ending
first started.

Arm back at that branch sink the branch sink the branch sink that floaty floaty johnny-come-jellyfucker.

In the storm you will let a round boy like a rock be pulled shouting
from the cave of your belly.

Such seaweed-streaked lanterns, such mica-frail feet.

Fate is the thing we say to say the happened thing happened.

If the sun moved, if the water—


E. Briskin lives and writes in Seattle.