AND THE CAPTAIN, TOO

a fleet of ships and the captain, too nestled between my collar bones you tell me a story about the sea a swordfish or maybe it was a woman too tired to take her life back to shore lips blue, waterlogged pressure turning the insides of her against the phantom limbs and their thrashing in the riptide the bends and the backbreaking bedsheets are only algae if you could be so kind as to wring them out before we’re done here? she demurs, deluded, delirious distrusting i let you wash up on my shores, even in low tide even in a time like this, where a body beached and stranded is something to hide