Monday, February 29, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by John Melillo 























every relief shows a response that refuses to remain

a return

all the mechanisms fell down and took apart the light

from there

now that they repeat a manifold, only the holes broken in it

layer

the limited that was ours with the trash that said

okay I’ll have

it that releases the shared into this one thing not yours and no common

space in the maelstrom

will pull the you from the I or the surface from itself, wave

from wave’s wave



Friday, February 26, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Susan Gillis 


Another grey morning.
Only bare trees
break up the middle ground
between snow and sky.

As usual, I take a bowl of coffee upstairs.
As usual, snow begins to fall lightly.

Small sounds occur, like the fan, the refrigerator,
J. placing his cup on the tray, shushing the cat
who is whining for something more.
Shh, he says, then more sharply, whsht!

Looking up from my book to another dull sky
the wish for light, real sunlight,

the kind that opens cracks,
that makes wet shine and damp gleam,
radiance even the coldest rock absorbs

rears up wildly, rushes into my throat.
That’s what I say to myself then, whsht!



Sunday, February 21, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by John MacKenzie


I know little about sunrise.
It comes, they say, once a day.
I have waked, occasionally, to see
Its traces still on the world,
Yellow and red stains of light
Spreading around clean shadows

Shrinking from the touch; as beggars
Might shrink from bankers on the street
If they knew that corpse-cold flesh
Subsumes what it touches.
Though sometimes, as today, dawn
Finds me walking by the water.

The north wind blows offshore carrying
A wailing tuned among city towers
Across the harbour clotted with spume,
Freezing to splintered teeth gnashing
Again after another false spring. I know
We forget what we know. Sun, rise.



Thursday, February 18, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Julie Cameron Gray


Tourists, the seashore is nothing
more than a dirty mile
of horizon and the smell of fish
tacos clinging to our clothes.

Who will be the last alive
to share this view?
The ten carat gold sky,
its mustard gas dream.

Let’s find a handsome cab
and tell the driver to drive
around until the meter
hits sixty and the horses tire,

the sun forever rising
on the British empire,
dragging its gamey leg
around town.



Monday, February 8, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Ingrid Ruthig


Piss, she says, the paint’s
all urinary shades! And later,
look how the catalogue muddies
what’s clear if you’re present
this frame of world
viewed through a master’s eye
is the tint of a jaundiced day.

It’s tough to do justice,
reproduce the nature of disclosure
or capture the exact moment
we understand
this swirling miscreation
hunkered agape in the smirch
stares out as if willing us to see

we’ve always been
inside it, drowning
in the picture we paint of ourselves
looking back, invisible 
on a diminishing shore
all day long
or as long as the light holds.



Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Jacqueline Valencia


This is the ick that lines the stomach
when crisis strikes.

Instead of butterflies there
Pisces exists
having just missed
a scheduled planetary alignment
it all goes retrograde
affecting Taurus in the gut.

A new day dawns but the
visceral pain
is still there
the fishes swim
making the heart sick
instead of bloom
they jet out
every which way
from tips of fingers
top of the head
hang on to the throat
for a while before
heading down to the toes
making the knees buckle
in their trajectories.

They spin so fast
create another
species of themselves
growing tentacles out
blotting out whatever light,
love, and a solar system of
hope becomes eclipsed by
a new soul-sucking,
gall-ingesting void.

A body is a cage of feeling
and the keys are hidden in the head
in cosmic antlers
the monster can only get out
when hurt escapes all reason
so push it down with astral arms
down further below
and it will dive
to avoid its disintegration
a fence will be built to corral it
binding it into submission
as an impression of its purest form
grief in repression.

The sun rises again
despite the emotional
whirlpool of endurance
in the solar plexus
obscuring the deep feel.