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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.