Thursday, February 9, 2017

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Alanna Schiffer


We wake up despite ourselves.
Intermittent static and tempura
squid-fingers of a yellow dawn. 
 
I love you in that gross, Irvine Welsh
sort of way; cross-hatched in difficulty, in
city fog. Garbage birds populate the shore
 
of my sluggish adamantium, pathogens and rust
coagulate into a Magic Eye likeness of Freddie Mercury.
Scotch tape blisters, the papery kid-puke smell of mid-century
 
library glue, loose vertebrae peeling away. Ping is the sound of my
heart, the sound of a screw falling out from a sleeping piston engine.
Ping is a story about punishment, or a duck fishing on the Yangtze.
 
All of them are asleep. Before they come for us, I brush chalk
from the creases of my pillow. At some point in the night,
we must have attended Coachella. Now where, on
 
the surface of the water, should we put this sign?
Achtung! There are three monsters. Each time
one is born from me, I say the same thing.
 
What have I done.
What have I done.
What have I done.