MARGY SLOAN

IT CAME UP

our having to eat so frequently lunch on the back of a pick-up truck heavy seas I can see what I can't see it when I awoke I was much older with used hands as if you yourself were a wound in reality and this created something to see through

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all the times an ocean came the water held itself up underneath the shadows held the water in the form it wanted the urgency of knife-like ridges which stood unlike water reaching towards gesture it said love was merciless like millions of animals live the focus one focus and another and other I can't say what it said only that it offered and demanded

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the water could arrange to be anywhere at windows or send for me to magnetically extend my body from a porthole and it rose and fell it arranged the motion of a ship to lower me into its province of water stiffly as if all standing up to speak don't miss this both terror and love

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wrinkled beaches the water came up it was livid and the bodies whirred and folded the sound of the water covered what we didn't want to hear the hedge between two waters one was supposed to be tame and the fish stood up the whole body was sucked up whole ocean moved into the sky as if one and films on the skin ran how many worlds could be wanted trying one rock it was empty the building or more loomed and hunched

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the metal chairs slid their bodies into the sea and dark closed you were operating on what level remember how it came right up to the porthole as if light had lifted the water up to be blessed or touched the whole ship had nodded you could say waves came barking and pointing with their light tips to where they could be seen isosceles was a kind of training we didn't like or want then it came indoors and laid itself slick along the floor a blue recess I wondered about the margins if it didn't rain anymore.

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and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands out in the water was a kind of vortex a skin of light that seemed to hold together curves out of the hole in the water time was something being born in a kind of music the silver chairs turned over limbs were whirring I lay on the beach with my feet pointing to the center of the ocean they knew where that was

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Margy Sloan lives and works in San Francisco and is a student in the New College of California Poetics program. This is her first publication and is excerpted from a longer work.