The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

He perches on the broad

promontory,

broods over the hulking jagged

black masses that wait, thirsty, for the blood

of any over-curious traveler.

He watches with a long-glassy orb,

dull but for the kindled life, relic of days slipped by,

glinting within when the sky pours forth fire.

He glowers over the muddy brawling waves,

stark and deserted, like

one of those ancient deities, sitting moldering on a shelf somewhere,

in someone's dusty library.

Zeus, maybe—but his thunderbolts lie rusty and unused,

and he hunches on his mount of slick, weather-beaten

stone, mulling over tumultuous pasts.

Wondering what became of his adorers,

the ones he steered to safety with resonating roar

echoing in its hearer's heart-cavity;

Wondering why, when Olympus trembled under him,

he knew brokenness.

Gods aren't supposed to break.

Wondering why all drifted away—

but for his neighbor, and he didn't matter.

Forever rolling, wrestling, spewing up encrusting,

bitter libations

that stuck in hard places, roughened the skin

and reeked of fish—

All of any worth gone like a hart into trees.

The incessant laugh and growl of the neighbor's heirs

Echoing, spectrally

insignificant, about deaf ears.

Harsh, choking birds tearing at his laurel crown,

a minor annoyance, only.

He keeps his head up firm and proud,

and muses on the past.

Barnacles

Word Count: 1200

Barnacles

Bailey cursed as the thin edge of the shell bit deep into the side of his hand. Snatching a dirty piece of cloth, he dabbed at the blood that bubbled up. It stung.

Holding the stained cloth to his hand, Bailey sat down heavily on a piling. The endless curve of the ship’s hull, like the soft swell of a shoulder or back, rose high above his head. At his feet, tiny whispers of the highest tide lapped. Shore birds waded in the water, searching for food. A few stood a hundred feet away, washing in and out with the waves, eyeing the slowly growing pile of barnacles and sea debris at Bailey’s feet.

“Whales carry barnacles. They swim just fine.” Bailey squinted up. A few feet above his head, the waterline ended. A crew had removed at least half the barnacles during the week. Now, Saturday, they had dragged him out of his bed and ordered him to continue the job. He picked up his scraper with aching fingers laced with half a dozen other cuts and went back to work.

A light breeze brushed through his hair and fluttered the heavy sheets of canvas hanging above. They’d done a terrible job of furling the sails and the heavy canvas flapped against the side of the boat. The breeze brought the faintest whiff of salt and sea, but also a heavy musty scent of fish and slime. Winter was coming, and the docks, usually teeming with life and encrusted with ships, stretched empty into the harbor.

Bailey’s scraper slipped again; swearing, he flung it down and smashed it beneath the heel of his boot as brilliant red stained his fingers.

At this rate, his hands would still be out of commission and useless for the sails when they headed back to sea next week. If only he were in charge instead of that stupid, half-drunk--

Bailey cut himself off, frowning. “Bloody idiot.”

A few hundred feet away, two figures emerged from the huddle of huts and customs houses on the shore. They had the rolling gait of inveterate seamen who had not recovered their land legs after a week on shore and probably never would. The two of them sauntered side by side down the longest dock and stood at the end, staring out over the rolling water into a horizon flat and empty and endless. The soft movement of the waves carried their words like a piece of driftwood directly to Bailey’s ears as he slumped on his piling.

“We’re really casting off next week?”

“He says we can make it.”

“Do you know what ye need to make the next set of islands, Davis? Fresh water and fair weather! Not grog.”

“The grog is for morale. You of all people ought--”

“What does he think we’re doing, dancing drunk till midnight?”

Bailey gave a little jump as he recognized the resonant voice of the speaker, adapted to carry over the wind in a storm, as the first mate. His partner would be Davis, Captain O’Hara’s clerk. Everything in his body suddenly attuned to the soft noise across the waves.

The first mate spoke again.

“What is the temper of the cabin?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Give us an estimate, then.”

Davis dropped his voice and Bailey couldn’t make out the rest. He wobbled on his piling and realized he’d been leaning toward them.

“...five days,” the first mate said, gesturing toward the horizon. A thin bank of clouds was building at the edge of the sea.

“...three days out of port.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Two days, perhaps.”

Bailey stood as the voices trailed off. Deliberately, he swept the fragments of his scraper to the ground beneath the dry dock. They clinked against rocks covered in dry, stiff sea moss. He walked to the end of the dock, the vast clumsy bulk of the ship rising behind him, and looked out.

“It’s our duty,” the first mate was saying.

“Can you rely on your men?”

“All of them. And you?”

A quiet sound of assent.

“...the winter. I guarantee, once he sobers up, he’ll thank us.”

A handshake. More silence. The first mate reached down and scooped up a handful of water, letting it run out between cupped fingers. A flurry of breeze snatched spray from the tops of the waves, bringing a sudden chill and a heavy smell of rain and lightning that was gone almost before Bailey could identify it. He shivered.

Since he was a boy, he had dreamed of overhearing plans just like this. He had dwelt on the thrill it brought him to imagine saving an entire ship and its crew, defending the captain at all costs from a few desperate mutineers.

Davis and the mate walked back down the dock toward the tiny town. Bailey watched them go, picturing Captain O’Hara. He’d hardly seen the man on the last leg of this voyage--but he’d heard him, wailing mournful sea songs from behind his cabin door late into the night. He’d felt the man’s presence as the ship wallowed in the last storm, tight sails humming in the wind and threatening to break.

Bailey looked up at the bulk of the ship’s hull, discolored and still crusted with patches of barnacles.
He had never sailed under such an incompetent captain before. Yet in all his boyhood fantasies, he had never imagined himself taking the side of the mutineers.

Another gust of wind brought the scent of rain to his nose, and it lingered this time.

He turned back, arms crossed as he headed back up the dock toward his lodging. At the end of the dock, leaning on a cane, stood a tall, bearded figure. Captain O’Hara.

Bailey stopped in his tracks. The captain had not noticed him. The words he had just heard flashed through his brain with white-hot intensity. Then the face of his father, waving farewell from the dock at home.

Take care of him, his father had said.

For the life of him, Bailey did not understand what his father saw in Captain O’Hara, but he trusted him.

Captain O’Hara spotted him and waved his cane. Even at a distance, Bailey could see the brilliant white teeth that split the beard in a smile. He waved back. Maybe the captain knew already. But perhaps he did not. He did not know what the crew was planning. Maybe the man’s life was in danger.

Maybe not.

Bailey put his hands in his pockets and resumed his walk up the dock as casually as he could.

“Ahoy, Bailey! Seaworthy yet?”

“Not yet, sir,” Bailey said, worried his voice would give him away.

“Get her ready! We sail Sunday!”

This close, Bailey could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Sir, I’m not sure--”

“Sunday, Bailey! The next port awaits us. By the way--have you seen Davis?”

Bailey took a deep breath.

“No, sir.”

“Hm. Haven’t been able to find him today.” Captain O’Hara turned and, leaning on his cane, made his way back toward the town.

Bailey bit his tongue and watched him go.

Illicit

Word count: 920

Illicit

When she’d left the apartment, the silent eye contact with her roommate was all they needed—a tacit thanks, just in case. She waited to zip up her tattered suit until she was in the hallway. The less her roommate knew, the better.

Standing in a short alley, she adjusted her dingy cloth mask that itched behind her ears. Her protective suit lay in a crumpled pile against the wall. As she peeled off her second-to-last pair of latex gloves and carefully dropped them into a plastic bag for safekeeping, the cool night air felt toxic and intoxicating.

Behind her, a raccoon quietly rooted through a pile of food scraps in a dumpster. It didn’t even know she was there.

She took a deep breath of air that smelled like sterile fabric and old breath, her boots crunching softly over broken glass as she moved back to the front of the alley and waited.

Hers was a dangerous job. The Conflict had soured the air, leaving lingering traces of chemicals hanging in the air. It was no longer safe to be outside without protection, they were told. Those who did venture out passed each other on opposite sides of the street, heads down, and patrols of policemen in heavy protective gear patrolled the streets. People looked at each other through tightly closed windows—no one could regulate looking—and remembered back through endless days to the time before, when they brushed past one another on the street without a thought, clasping hands and even trading stiff hugs.

People were hungry—so hungry.

She leaned against the wall, hands uncovered in the dangerous air. She could never tell if the tingling on her skin was the air brushing over fine hairs, or wreaths of toxic chemicals slowly killing her. She was hungry, too, perhaps more than the rest of them. Her entire body craved it. Empty, hollow, it waited. The soft scratch of her shirt against her shoulders reminded her how empty she felt, as though her skin were a shell around and empty core waiting to be filled with something warm and life-giving.

Across the street, in a patch of shadow, another figure appeared. He, too, was bare-handed, bare-faced, open to all the silent deadly fury of the open air. A gleam of light glinted off his bald head as he leaned out and acknowledged her with a brief wave, the living brown of his skin a kind of protest.

She waved back, their hands, flickering into the light together, a symbol of solidarity.

She waited for an hour and a half, the emptiness inside pulsing with her breath and heartbeat, as if the craving were a living thing. The breeze across the back of her neck felt like torture. Her stomach was empty, too—they’d spent the last of their money the night before on her roommate’s medication, and the pantry was dangerously empty.

“Hey,” a voice came out of the darkness.

She jumped. How long had she been standing there numb?

“Um…how much?”

She’d heard the question before—someone shy and desperate, uncertain how to ask but ready to risk the patrols for a little contact.

“Twenty for a handshake, a hundred for a minute.”

A shaking hand held out an envelope. Inside, a stack of small bills as big as her hand. Enough for groceries for a week, maybe.

“My mom got sick,” the voice said.

She braced herself, beckoning the owner of the voice, a young woman in the closest homemade approximation of protective gear she’d seen yet, back into the alley. A street down, a siren whooped once and fell silent.

“I haven’t been able to see her since. I’m not sure if she’s—”

They were often like this. Full of their own grief that spilled over when they came. Not that sharing changed anything. Sometimes it made them feel better, though—they had to justify their actions to themselves, or relieve some massive burden.

Satisfied that the patrol was occupied, she beckoned her closer. Touch sent shivers of lightning down her back. The emptiness inside flooded, roiling and bubbling. Breath caught in their throats.

A siren again, closer. Her heart raced. But euphoria rushed through her with the touch of hands on shoulders. They were coming. They would be searching alleys. She could take the money, leave now.

But business had been bad, and in the contact the grief in both their hearts flowed back and forth between them, waking something nearly painful that had been stirring for weeks. Like a hand clenching an electric fence, galvanized solid and unable to free itself, she could not let go.

Tears wet her shoulder and with them fizzed anger, deep and gut-wrenching. It wasn’t their fault that the air was laden with chemicals. It wasn’t their fault that they had to live like this, cut off. She wasn’t even sure it was real. People had to touch, sometime.

She heard the patrol car’s engine starting up as her customer tightened her grip. If a patrol caught you out without protection, there was a fine. Caught out with others—jail time.

Anger seethed. She whispered “they’re coming,” and thickly through tears her customer whispered back “let them come.” So they remained, locked together, filling up, tears trickling as the contact released something long locked up inside.

They remained that way until the first beam of a flashlight shot down the alleyway and the quiet of the deserted night broke beneath the quick, professional footsteps of a patrol.

They Told Me To Write (2 versions)

They Told Me To Write

Jessica M.

They told me to write

Poetry,

That maybe the void in me

Would speak into the darkness,

So I slashed my palm and took my pen

Because it has to be done in blood,

They say,

And in rhyme and meter.

And there are these things called feet

But they aren’t feet

Because in poetry, nothing is what it is,

But all symbols and imagery.

It has to come from a dark place,

They say,

And it must be done in one sitting

Crystallized hard and clear and perfect,

And if it doesn’t reflect the sun

And the stars

And your heart

And your pain

And the bleeding of the world,

It doesn’t count.

But I’m just trying to make it rhyme.



They Told Me To Write (Version 2)

They told me to write

Poetry, so that maybe

The void within me

Would speak in darkness.

So I slash my palm and I

Take my pen and I

Write, because it must

Be done in blood, they say, in

Rhyme and rhythm; when

Words aren’t themselves, it’s

Poetry--nothing is what

It is, but it’s all

Symbols, imagery.

It must come from a dark place

They say, and you race

To write with no stops.

Crystallized, hard, clear, perfect,

Poetry reflects,

Perfectly, the sun

And the stars, your heart, your chains,

The world and its pain,

Or it doesn’t count.

My hand bleeds for a long time,

I must start with rhyme.

Which version did you like better?