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.

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.

 

 

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Nick Thran 

To be drawn to a certain quality of abstraction.

The shape-shifting stains

on a monster’s teeth,

the miasmic wash

of a monster’s breath. To consider

monsters who emerged

at the crest of the wave

or in the valley that followed the wave

or at the crest of the wave

after that. The clock

next to the log

has sunk. The log

has sunk. The sun on deck is less

a summer’s morn’

and more like a diagnosis.

Had we chased them far enough from shore?

Were good ones lost?

Is to love this smeared image

a morbid love?

Why cast two eyes

on a sunrise like this?

Because otherwise only
a monster does. 

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Ally Fleming


It sputters, then it surges; 
ocean enconched then at- 
ankle, rising, ripping want, 
a whip-wave night, stars 

my squall-scattered teeth. 
Lear-blind, scale-palmed 
monster me, roaring we 'til 
morning groans horizon: 

the yellow smoke that rubs 
its back against that rubs 
against the yellow fog the 
smoke that comes and goes 

The lustre of red wreckage 
queasing, gored gorgeous: 
sea-glint glut of pitching 
eyes and eyes and eyes.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Roseanne Carrara

I swallow every time I see it. An old 

man's calf, piece-jaundiced, shot with veins 

so adjective they'd take any impression. 

An end table, for like, must have stamped that owl 

of a sea-cottage on his leg, the leg 

in question. The kids love it. When he lifts

his pants-hem to show off the extent,

they’re mesmerized. They want to climb 

inside that muscle, purple shed, and scavenge, 

run their fingers over things, fill their pockets 

with ceramics and manual-wind watches 

they emphasize are chipped, inoperative. The kids, 

they take and take, and large. Course, they don't know 

my brother lived in there. Who knows what would 

have happened to them if they'd gone inside 

that bruise when he was holed up there. Least, 

they would have missed curfew. He’d have kept 

them talking, forever, he was going to make,

the commonest, his first and second million 

in as many ways. Worst, still mild, though, 

he'd have dragged one of them across the carpet 

by the ankle  — the girl, maybe — to get 

himself fixed up with that glass of water 

he didn't want to fix, himself. Did that 

to me, once. He didn’t live for water, 

though, he should have done. He wasn't placid, 

then, but physic-pale. And I was right. 

If he didn’t kill someone sometime soon, 

he’d be the accident himself. I'd already 

suffered so much over him, the whole of his body 

inside that calf, that when he slept good, 

finally, took some real hue, bruise-indigo, 

himself, and stiff as anything, I felt adjective just. 

Red flag's out now. Wait, they say, for the helpers,

help will always come. But that’s a false tip,

loose bunting on consignment, Long, 

loves, I swallow every time I see it. 

It'll make you terrible, I tell them, so they’ll look 

back into that calf’s swelling, stare, 

and wish they could have pocketed 

something smaller, more efficient, 

when they first went rummaging in there.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Stuart Ross

A horse sat down

on the bench beside me.

“Look at the bunny,” it said,

“leaping into the sun.”

Water is very popular. You can see through it. A horse and I noticed it in the distance. We couldn’t get enough of that fluid. It constituted much of us. We became unusually thirsty. When we tried to hang the water on our living room wall, it tumbled to the floor. There it did roil. Aye, it roiled.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Peter Norman 

after Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Oh scale-shawled twineye

your undulations call to me

as krill-rimed finblotch

on barnacled monstrosity.

Groupers implore you

from jaw-girdled skulldome

(haplessly hung there

twixt crinkly fangtrusion)

that you decline to rend them

with heaving gobbersmacks

of gangleous codcruncher.

Likely you won’t.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Ashley-Elizabeth Best 

In the morning's breath of mist I stare at the sea

that tells me nothing. I pound clothing into a scarp

of slatted rock, water seeping into porous stone.

The winds hunted howl of sound disguises his approach.

Calm with experience, my voice slowly breaks out of its

own heaviness.

He's promenading in the hang of blue fog, I conjure

the ground as I walk towards him. He's saying something

about god's that live in the trees but I know only of the sea.

I unbutton his shirt, uncover the wound so beautiful it is

forgotten in its loveliness.

He was smiling in the way I fear, shrugged himself nearer

like a thing waiting to be hurt. A gasp of time, pink forage

made a quick flush on my face where his mouth disgraced.

The tragic consequences of his presence suffocates, nearly

reveals the wealth of hate in me. What was Eve's apple of

choice? This must be mine.

There is much in me to be forgiven. My deciduous memory,

pleasure-flawed in the slow everlasting disease of grief.

I promise to tell him as much as I know.

The life in me trembles to the life in him.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Melanie Janisse Barlow 

there were no snacks at the breakup

there are no monsters at this ressurection

in it

it is so tender, so so tender

a heart-accordion

each chakra lighting up like a light bulb on the upswing

in it

a battle between earth and water

interactive Geminis

in it

the cup of anger ferments into a dangerous scoby

we drink tumeric until our mouths are yelloworange

sweetsalty blend

in it

you are a dead giveaway

if the sun is god it's a win here

only a whisper of a trap

set somewhere in the silt

of a morning coffee

in it
an inner

            pheasants on Brush Street scattering, multi-lingual 

the skirt of Martha Graham evertwirling

in it gold tinsel swishing

an old, knowing dog crouching

rusts

a tin ceiling bent downwards

init some kind of holy order

morning light is on pause

bent into a broken thing

shadowed

two men in their cups on a beer-bottled brown lawn

candles keeping away bad spirits

plants reaching skywards 

old peeling signs

a wilted text message

tuning forks, tuning

did it die of lonliness Gwen?

was it the last of our mysteries?

indeed

it did, it was

ladies dressed in white lining the walls 
whispering

in it such an inner

in it the bricks are burning

we are eating garlic sauce and 3d pita in Hamtramck

with the sun kinding

perhaps it is all friendly

and really what we have here is fish

but the mothers are voiceless

and loud in their inference

in it my language opposites

in it i tell you to hang pictures of what happened

a productive Tuesday
in it problem solving is A1
in it i was thinking of tying a porkchop around my neck so the cat would play with me

everyone is sorry to see you gone

relax

its just two fish

what is wrong with you?

they are middling

in it the stars are on an upswing

a pearly white dashboard only practical in the a.m.

in it an inner

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Jonathan Bennett

Where there is doubt, there is

information stacked upon data

shoved in between factoids

that I catch and lob back.

If you could just open your mind, he says                                                           

you could begin to believe the evidence.

Air brakes expel, he ducks 

as if shot at, we normalize

the moment for passersby

who flip us weird or pity.

If you could believe the evidence, he says

eventually your mind would begin to open.

Where is radical cool? Frequently 

missed across the dial, surely.

I catch and lob back white noise

squelching as ever-retreating loss. 

Sad face, he says. You are too skeptical. 

You can't believe evidence way back there.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Nathan Dueck

umami chamomile lathers algae

and acetous ducts salivate C. albicans rheum

alkaline brine

kombucha curdles acerbic mucus

dopamine D₄ undulates sulfurous chute flume

and lye vitellus

and saccharin fungi chardonnay gurgles

igneous tracts percolate β-keratin spume

ethanol gall

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Alice Burdick 

Sun rides us, inspired by the bristles

that stretch into the mainstream.

The moon rides the deep-down creatures

too. This is every day as a planet.

Whatever sits and stares at us

mixes our colours into a bright portent.

That’s a word you don’t see every day,

but you could. Sun rides us,

long tail into the atmosphere.

I told you it was a bright beginning

but that’s not the whole story.

When you live at the bottom of a bright

day, the mud is a warm and fertile

bed. You are happy there,

and happy here, where all the smallest

breathers dive. They blink right

into your golden maw. Horses

of the ancients paw the clouds

for water’s fall. When you are small

the smallest ancients too loom large.

Will we catch them? We try. We dive,

but we’ll never finish - instruments stuck

deep in the lowest muck.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Jason Heroux 



Every sunrise

brings its own

sea monsters:

one morning

it was just a rabbit

we saw on our way

home lying injured

alongside the road

in yellow grass

hit by a car still

half-alive gazing up

at us as we went by.

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.