Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

What had once been many shades of sun

and cloud and what we had predicted to have

a chance of is now. The face looking at us is

an outline floating in with two eyes and

a mouth. This face could be ours looking back

from some past we’re going toward or just an

expression trying to keep us out. Whatever it is

does not matter. Wanting to live does. If

it is saying something we can’t stop for it. If it is

reporting the future and says what’s happened

sew it shut and anchor it to sink and to stay sunk.

We were going before anyone could call us gone.

Souvankham Thammavongsa's fourth poetry collection Cluster is forthcoming from M&S in 2019.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Joel Giroux


What am I but your own 
inhuman eye, blind to all 
but the red vision I am 
and am not, surrounded by 
an amber world only periphery — 
visible only from above, below; 
my ochre centre rattling the crux 
of a world you wish did not exist 
but expands, still, like a gas, 

an ephemeral non-thing, 
a transparent lid lifted 
by a blackened hand 
to reveal a red iris, a disease 
of vision bled into a broiling landscape 
that lacks the utter nightmare 
of me, gleaming like the rotten ideal 
of your dulled, inevitable horizon. 

Even in God’s bloody eye 
I don’t exist, I do 
in yours, and in the gold glare 
that borders my face 
growing slowly, approaching you 
from out a darkness disguised 
as everything the sun sees 
but does not speak of, ever 

out of immortal fear.