Poem: Flanked

 Flanked

 

the sky swam,

flank of a shark,

darker toward the deepening night,

 grim Atlantic blue.

 

there were birches that had no leaves.

birches that reached up 

like lymph nodes stored in jars,

and you could almost taste 

the formaldehyde,

 the kind that kept fond idols

immortal and bright enough

to float in some semblance 

of fake outer space.

in fact,

 

without the moon,

inevitable in the frost,

the Sisters and the Crab loomed dog-bark crisp.

 

someone near me

commented on the brute logic

of the nascent tumescence

in those skeletal shapes,

 

a somewhat orbital comfort,

 more vast than Euclidian,

more ‘in the eye,’ than fonts of joy

 

and yet 

they curved down,

as all human concepts do,

choppy into the iron of the Atlantic,

sinking toward the golden ambush

of the great Devourer.

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3/4/26 ... more heavy mods

6/21/24 .. heavy mods

11/28 Flipped the prepositions in lines 16 and 17,  "of" "in"