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.

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.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Andy McGuire

Alone in the kitchen,

I think of the word Kalamazoo

for as long as it takes

to move past

thoughts of little league, cold

as Minnesota memories in Texas,

past the dumb desire

to want a picture of myself

in left field,

because for that I would need a baseball

diamond and a glove,

not to mention a camera

with a father attached.

Past the slow fireworks of October

and weather that causes sleeves to turtle

over hands,

because they did me no good

crossing the Davis Strait

aboard the Lyubov Orlova,

unable to shake

the serpents of early Arctic maps, looking out

over teething whitecaps

with the intensity of a pro dart player

about to throw. I realized

I could slip away

unnoticed, a thousand clicks

north of where the trees and soil split

over creative differences.

After I left the Orlova, she broke it off with a tow

line unable to hold

the whole of her, opting

for a derelict life in the North Atlantic,

where she is now

believed to be relieved of her buoyancy.

Only the righteous would linger

in a landscape that makes you feel like the first

and last speaker of a language.

Martyrdom has its disadvantages.

I lock my life goals

and death drive

together in solitary

and watch them get their Stockholm on.

Because I have never been

to Kalamazoo. It sounds like a cheap place to shoot

over breakfast, holding the thrill

of the thought of something surfacing, but not.

Because only on a sleepy avenue

where they still say Yes

and Okay

and Alright then

can I score my civil war

in peace.

Cast in a sunbeam that would just as soon bleach

my bones, I airlift

my last spoon of cereal and brace

for the breach, ready to seat

my breaker, arms

crossed like the opposite of Christ.