These whales are ugly
I think we ought to go home
meanwhile, the captain’s scoliosis
leaves him deliciously draped
over the ship’s prow
Everything is precious, except
the burnt toast & slop from the galley,
the thumb of the cook
folded neatly in the omelet
no one would touch for days
eventually the gulls came
And my binoculars have frozen
to my face, my Arctic heart
has made a mathematical mistake
I turn left every time,
watching first the sun sink, then watching
night grow fat on itself
We slit the bellies of beached things
and burn what oil spills out around us
Learning to be brave, my mother’s a good shot,
though the rifle knocks her down, taking down the beer
cans, too, from the whitewashed fence, Tom Sawyered
by another,
here it must be the South, or some
analog, maybe a crooked street in New England,
where the Jehovah’s Witness sings, crumpling
a pamphlet into my fist (“Teachers? What
would we do without them?”), and I watch
her take to the crosswalk with the force
of a storm on the ocean, and Jesus sleeping,
a wrinkled brain that holds dreams of vegetable
gardens in World War II, nylons drawn up
the housewife’s back, her back bent
to the sun, dirt under her nails and one lone
slug on the wrist, its dumb faceless face,
content to moisten all that it can touch,
like a kiss, Jesus dreams of a kiss.
Miranda Dennis is 312 feet above sea level.