[399 words]
I am heart,
that thick gnarl of pump and blood.
This cage around me is my sky,
my blood brothers
crammed around me
below deck in
this wet rocking boat–
kidney, oafish liver,
snaked intestines
that sleep and never help keep
the ocean boat in motion.
I am dark navigator
where they say love dwells,
though that’s a possible myth
from the mouth above.
Suddenly with scream and hammer
we crash upon a rock,
what else could it be,
and we roll as gashes of light come
from all sides.
Crack of father bone.
Rush of mother liquid drowning us.
My lover lung is flat,
bronchioles torn out
like gristled, broken roots.
Then stillness.
Long sleep.
Comatic dances where I beat the drums
of restless fairies.
I hear new voices
and feel my rise in the boat,
this sacred ship, my home,
my god.
Are the voices angels?
Is the rumbling heaven?
The angels argue in nervous,
whining darkness.
Then my arched sky cracks open
with a blue burn on my surface.
This is not the light I was promised.
My limbs are pinched, then snipped,
my steady thumping halted
like the earth stopped spinning,
and my drooling torso rises
carried in cream starfish hands.
This is a cradle.
This is a cloud.
This is a holy pond.
I fly.
I pass in air someone similar–
dismembered like me,
but he his darker, colder,
dry,
sad,
sick as tired fish.
I feel the scrape of his death,
wonder his age.
He does not seem older than I.
A vacuum of dread eats him.
I know now he betrayed his ship.
He betrayed his god.
He would not row.
I am placed in a drowned hole
kept open by metal jaws
and octopus arms
that tremble and hiss with monoliths.
I am stretched like a rag doll
on a sponge cutting board,
then sewn meticulously
to new tubular limbs
by those curling, shaking starfish.
I trust these starfish
with nails like smiling faces.
I must,
to calm myself
as my beating begins again–
that beating that is my music,
my primordial percussion.
My cosmos.
My sky is sealed shut,
this ebony abdomen cathedral
that distills above me,
distills my new wet siblings.
We will work and prosper.
I will pump and love
in my new rocking god
till we root in the quiet earth
where this ocean turns to stone.
Marc Darnell is an online tutor and lead custodian in Omaha NE. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa, and has published poems in The Lyric, Rue Scribe, Verse, Skidrow Penthouse, Shot Glass Journal, The HyperTexts, Candelabrum, The Road Not Taken, Aries, Ship of Fools, Open Minds Quarterly, The Fib Review, Verse-Virtual, Blue Unicorn, Ragazine, The Literary Nest, The Pangolin Review, and elsewhere. His latest book is Forecast: Increasing Visibility from Kelsay Books. He has 3 times been awarded the Academy of American Poets prize.
