As I Take These Three Beaches, I Think of All the Things That Have Saved Me
By Eve Gore
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Three Beaches Gliding over rocks and sea, My eye wanders beyond where my body can reach, Brine, and salt, and high tide, In three beaches I roamed, As far as the sea permitted the land, To make way for my body, tattooed with the imprints of sand, Searching for mother of pearl in the blurred grey of a foggy midday. In three beaches never did I open the mind. Never thought of what she, for the sea is a she more than I can be she, Could bring me, lapping so hungrily at my feet. In all dark debris must all secret things emerge, Must past lives be free, and must death be sweet. In the folds of the beach, Such an unexpected thing. A fox cub, fur matted, wet deep to the skin. It could have been merely taken by sleep, If not for the way its neck was twisted. How did you get here, babe of city and streets? What murderer dumped you in the river ebbs? What did your body endure, carried by the cruel sea?
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Sea Glass The stones of the beach are only pretty, only worthy, When the sea has dragged them limply down the beach, Flushed their surface with strokes of paint, The way the artists in their brown smocks on the pier, Marry blue with white, build foam from mottled dabs. There are famous works of art in these gems, for a moment, Till the sun punishes them, turns them back to grey and dull, And I scrabble at the ground, brittle as my nails are, For perhaps watching it lose its beauty is comforting, To witness the fairy-tale curse in the daylight, Or maybe it is the kind of sight that is so deeply frightening, That it stirs something like obsession.
Between the rocks, they call it sea glass, Can it cut my skin, these little white shards? Conceived in tumultuous tides, birthed on stormy nights, Past lives in discarded ugly human things, They stand between the wilting beauty of the beach Not belonging to anything, like a girl in trouble, Could I become so beautiful pressed below the surface? Or is my face as timely as pebbles in the sun.
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Abyss Is it fear that freezes us in the abstract? Like floating in the Caspian Sea. Our brave self, bound above us in rope, Devoid of the chance for erotic redemption., And laboured by the horror of living and fractured breathing, Eating and disturbed sleeping, Moving through the mass of the abyssal zone, Where nothing can dare exhale, everything is decay. My body is Kaikō, what severed white gloves hold the remote? Is everything around me a death trap or does it stem from within? Could another inhabit this life and live it better than I could? Or am I chemically an apocalypse land? Do I destroy what I love? Exterminans Taking my place as archangel of the abyss, Passing mesopelagic, bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, hadopelagic, Like Alice, falling while the mind is occupied. “Can one evolve in their own lifetime?” I wonder, “Could I grow a little taller if I wanted it enough?” Entering a plane where the light is trapped, Blue is the only colour that can make it through. The sea becomes the atmosphere, becomes space, The delusion of falling takes me to the moon of King Minos, Jupiter emerges below me, like a painless childbirth I see it below. Its patterns remind me of the painted strokes of the waves I left behind, And I am overcome with a sense of peace, As my deadweight hits the seafloor, I see detritus stars.
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Eve Gore Instagram: @madamandevepoetry Twitter: @madamandevepoet Tumblr: @madamandevepoetry
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As I Take These Three Beaches, I Think of All the Things That Have Saved Me © 2021 All rights reserved
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