Beached What Found in NYC is Dead

-CBS news headline, 12/27/2012

 

What is it on the shore among the cockle shells and sea grass,

the beached thing, swelling, gulls pecking at the sores: this question

straining to breathe under its own gravity. The biggest questions

exist uneasily here. I love when they call me ‘wera,’ she tells me.

and of course, I don’t ask. Somewhere along the coastline, Zihua:

the wind tastes like the rim of a margarita glass, the Mexican boys trill

their r as they say it. They teach her to cha-cha and to tango. They wake

still drunk and naked on the beach, seaweed reeking, and the sun stuck

in the dunes like it won’t ever rise, black dog chasing the gulls,

orange morning slowly pouring itself over her salty yellow hair:

a mosquito in amber, maybe, or some other time-stopped thing—maybe

the flash-frozen moment of a first kiss or a goodbye. There is more than one way

to be stuck. A question is an auger, boring into the amber. Don’t ask.

Queens, New York: I’m there, walking Palmer Drive in search of a question,

and she’s telling me across three thousand miles, wera, wera, wera—she trills

like they taught her, no sign among the waves of the Rockaway

of the thing ending its life on the shore, before it even knows what it is.

 

by Brandon Getz

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