Scusset Beach
By: Leslie Young
Hissing rocks play
Nerves like silk or poison
Pulled back on themselves
By breaking rage of old days.
Such a cold, cold mother
Whose kiss sucks away foundations,
Whose earnest breath can kill. The ocean
Is my home, my own, my owed rest,
Love to gulls feet, agony
To mine. Cold stabs, penetrates.
As I go deeper my womb cramps:
Promises are broken, words erased.
The sky lends its color to her skin. Chameleon,
We bend, find sand dollar skeletons, carapace
Of crabs, the gooey tissue left by sloppy gulls,
Sandy and fishy. In the Maw, the place nothing but itself,
The soul nothing but prisoner. On land a house waits grasp-eyed
Tonight the moon will howl silence
In the raspy grass, will chill the sand now antiseptically hot,
But I won’t be here to see it, back home
I will be
Nowhere at all
Leslie Young lives in Massachusetts with a small black dog.