I Can't Not Write At the Beach

Recent beach musings. For Evisceral I used essentially the same prompts I used for this post. Wildly different poems, huh? Today a friend told me the only thing new under the sun is the infinite possibility of metaphor. I love that.

Evisceral

It was raining the night I awoke.
The night I knelt and sucked the silver-painted brine
stirred by shifting claws.
The night I stood naked
and opened my arms and body to the sharp cutting needles,
welcoming the evisceration to come -
the tearing open.
The night I heard the whispers of the ancestors
rise to a shrieking roar amidst the raging storm
imploring me to fling the heavy, suffocating blanket
protecting my womb-box of dried, shriveled memories
hidden away as the undead, cringing from sun.
The night I felt the terror of exposure -
scurrying, crab-like, for shelter that was no longer there.
Eventually stilling in hopeless exhaustion
and surrender to the pour.
And in the stilling,
began to swell with life again.

Ode To A Seagull

I don’t know how long the bird shit had been on the window.

Months.

Long enough to not see it anymore.

I looked around it and through it;

Over it and under it;

I had stopped seeing it.

Was oblivious to how it colored everything I saw.

Colored with bird shit.

Everything.

But yesterday I saw it.

I don’t know why.

Suddenly it was just there.

In the way.

I couldn’t see what I needed to see.

It was the work of sixty seconds,

A paper towel and some Windex.

And suddenly everything was clear.

No shit.

Addendum: The photo for Evisceral is one I found on Google.  The seagull photo I took myself while sharing a bagel with some very hungry seagulls. I will confess that while I was thrilled to have such contact with the gulls, Hitchcock's 'The Birds' was definitely in the back of my mind.