Three Poems

The Ghost Ship

It’s not that we didn’t know. Your name, after all,
was the Ghost Ship, some kind of omen for what you’d become.

Ferrying somebody’s sister, somebody’s body, some bodies 
across that fiery water: elsewhere. I don’t believe

in elsewhere, an eternity of fire or sun. You were mannequin arms 
and a rug on a dance floor. Some kind of baroque, you

were built of pallets and tar paper, old couches, and terrycloth. 
Everything that burns. You were art, and art is always worth burning.

I don’t believe in fate. I believe in grief, what it does to us. 
Somewhere, somebody said: intergenerational trauma.

This isn’t my grief, not mine to carry, a chalky
fire-crisped piano, the twanging sound of each string popped

by heat. Everything can be a performance. The hand- 
lebars of a ’65 Panhead. Your dark mustache

and aviator shades. You didn’t die in this fire’s crush: 
a dream filled with opulence and hope.

Rents so high twenty-two people live and build
where they build beauty, too. This wasn’t how we lost you—

timbers crashed in char and singe, staircase crumbled 
in smoky crush—

The things we love to blame, the things we love 
end us. One fire or another, inheritance

of doors burned shut. I think of you with no escape 
I think of you                 how could I not

           my first ghost                  I wish I could
                        sail back to you                          I wish I could remember

[The italicized line “a dream filled with opulence and hope” is taken from Ghost Ship 
founder and master tenant Derick Ion Almena’s Facebook post the day after the fire.]

Muscle Test

They say it comes in waves, grief,
like the swell’s crush against
your small board in the ocean,
you learning to surf on such a vast sea, learning

like the boy so proud at the front of the class 
Coach quizzing him, the boy pointing
at his own body, moving
tibialis, gastrocnemius, latissimus

dorsi, the whole body
hurts, doesn’t it, after a day of surfing 
muscles you didn’t know you had 
muscles writing the next day,

sore, the neck turning to watch
for coming swells, for what you know 
will come, what you wait for, can’t 
avoid, pointing here, here,

trapezius, pectoral, the pull of your body 
and the hard board pushing back out 
against the waves coming and coming 
barely any relief in between.

My Mouth Tastes the Ocean When I Kiss My Love

She builds a causeway of her own skin : a road to the sea

She is all water                       hard-shelled crab, heart of fish, hidden sting
                                                                                                        of extinct scorpion

Her bruised nape, sore hip, skewed scapula       the intoxicating smell
                                                                                              of white flower oil and human touch

She is looking for a way back to herself : people, flesh, bone, spirit 
Can she call their names with her seaweed mouth?

She floats between meditation and sleep, body hovering like a frond blown onto calm seas

She is mathematics and perfect form : parabolic sand dune, eyelashes of grass, 
                                                                                 fingernails the empty shells of mollusks

Can I lie in the sun on the shore of myself?

            She built this landscape of what she loves
                                      salt-licked and kelp-strewn : let me rest

Let the swell of the tide carry my love                       her loss                     out to the deep