Friday, January 22, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Ali Znaidi


Sun can be a thick lemon in the mouths of invisible sea
monsters. The sea waves take the camouflage of sullied 
lemonade. It’s a matter of betrayal. A corpus of concepts 
distorted by translation and empirical encoding. This sun 
has arisen from a corroded sky, an eczematous firmament, 
or precisely, from a foundation that has nothing to do but 
conceal and mystify, creating glossy legends, but, in fact, 
the coin inside the wallet is rusty. It’s just a schema using 
fake metavariables that may be replaced by flowery linguistic 
items to yield malformed formulae—Fake golden piercings 
on the monsters’ tongues—This monstrous, one-sided, ugly 
truth they want us to believe under the lure of yellow shadows. 


Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters


by Keith Inman


Were you full of sarcasm, JT

a red a white buoy
snarled in stormy flotsam

net-washed on a beach
in coal-fired morning.

England, then, had everything
for what Beijing would become.

‘Erebus the whaler’ harpooning
the wealth of the world for jolly old
Britain. ‘Another fish,’ me hearties.

Feathered wolf-dogs gull
their way to the white winged whale-fin
flagging the crowd on the wharf,
‘Naought else to do, Gov.’
but surrender to wooden sharks.

Are these your sea monsters, JT
beyond a smashed cross,
timbers on a rocky, empiric shore,
sails in the fog.


Sunday, January 17, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Susan Perly


We are entering the mouth of dark
in every paint dream,
we are sailing on night feet
into fleet gold and the twisted weeping.

There are small moons outside our
hearing, small dragons stains
above us
in the too bright.

In our lucid mournings
it is way too bright
for our brains.

This dark
This gold
This footed mud with eyes


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Michael Prior 

i.m. M.M.


Salt cinches the corners of her face.
Across the bay, smoke scales the cranes
posed like hammers above the panes.
This sun, this face,
a damp match tossed into a blaze,
alight, then gone: the diode’s morphine
drip. A wave smooths her face.
Across the bay, smoke scales the cranes.


Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Catherine Graham



Wide awake like a parent or spouse, 
the worry having caterpillared 
down my spine crawls
into my mouth: where were you?

He stands at the front door,
a breathalyzer sticker on his chest.
Floating letters glean—
He did not pass. 

Downcast, he stares at my fingers,
waiting for the wag and point.
Relief. My father’s alive.
I shut my eyes to keep from waking up.


Thursday, January 7, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by David James Brock 



You’ll love my children more than I do. 
I will brag about a sapphire dug

from the sandbox. You’ll think I’m 
hungover. Gin. I am, and I’ll have kid shit

in my fingernails. A night swigging art 
is a hulk eschewing the shore, but the

swimmer is poor, sighs then sinks.

••

Dumb tentacle slaps the single parent:
a detriment...only two eyes watch...

Compare it to a pirate lost in a gulf. 
Half vs. a four-eyed Leviathan.

Compare it to the one armed
juggling her bully boys. Go on. Pump out


new cowards who fear the stone they turn to.

••

You’ll hate this. Fires blind the

coastal fabric stitches. DNA and dental 
records are ash. I sketch my dad strong

with Poseidon’s head: ψ.
Drag phobias to the water column’s


lowest part. Here is where a
sea god bobs, a body mishmash birthed. 



Saturday, January 2, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by rob mclennan


"Literality is vertiginous, like the kind of double-barreled tautology it produces."

— Emmanuel Hocquard


Across the bow,
a cut in ailment, mercy. Burdened,

tabloid-tone,

undone. This dawn

unwinds, horizon. Summarize:
elegiac. Time’s

nostalgic schema, bends

a yellow shadow.

Beds: each thing
a shining tone. This breach,

this beach,

unblurred. Withdrawn,
and monstrous. Hideous, at first.

And later, clarifies. Unbuttoned,
arisen from the language. Literality

is vertiginous. Quote.

A silence, cut               through

space.