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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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.