You held up a page on which you had written
everything is ongoing.
The mistake was, there was still blood on it
and we were on surfboards.
So you experienced a shark attack,
and I witnessed a shark attack.
They are more brutal than even the television
seems to understand.
And there is an unrelenting calm that surrounds
them. The rest of the surface of the ocean
that isn’t gory or frothing or churning or bubbling
but is still and serene and perfect
and holds an image of the moon
with these little lines moving through it.
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We are on our backs at the top of a hill.
We’re giving the clouds human names like Leroy and Fred and Judy and Spacely.
Your teeth are falling out, one by one, and you’re placing them in a sandwich bag.
There’s no blood. No pain, really. Just tooth after tooth into the bag.
My hands are palm down, taking root into the very top of the hill.
Leroy vanishes behind Fred, and Judy is only the fine mist of her former self.
You can’t remember if teeth are bone or cartilage, or something else altogether.
I can’t remember how to get home, or how we got here.
Mermaids rise up out of the water stretched out before us.
We can only make out their top halves. The bottom halves are assumed.
They are like stones punctuating the miles and miles of visible ocean.
A pack of bears roams the edges of the hill’s bottom, and they are fighting.
I’ve developed some kind of rash on my elbows and neck.
Here is a list of everything we brought with us:
three berry jam from Seattle
seeded crackers
a blanket
a tin full of water
frozen grapes in a Ziploc
a gun
a cheese knife
brie and something in wax that I can’t pronounce
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Colin Winette did a book of fiction with Spork. We like his poems also.