Jump Ship
Grey scarred sky.
Petrichor clouds pool.
The Pacific swells,
pushes & pulls
the trimaran my father
tries to command.
Cobalt waves bite white paint off out-riggers,
the hulls creak,
each sway to and fro sends
us closer to the rock hued shoreline
on Hollywood Beach.
My father persuades
the engine to kick a little longer:
a bubble trail that sputters out
in plumes rather than one long exhale.
He mutters curses into the sails,
but the ocean’s vocabulary
blows back with gale force.
A slick rope slithers
through his hands,
pinkens his palms.
Scarlet rivers
run from his hands.
From the right out-rigger,
I lean to touch rock,
push the boat away from shore,
tell my teenage muscles
to hold like my father
commands the engine to hold on
a little longer.
I hear my father call
the Coast Guard over the radio.
The engine dies,
my arms shake against rock,
and he says, “jump ship.”
Four years later,
the ferry’s angled hull cuts
white caps in half, each waves’
mist coats the deck
with ocean’s blood.
On the horizon: Victoria, BC,
small lights wink in and out of fog.
I lean on the rail, feel the ship find rhythm
on Juan de Fuca’s choppy straight.
I cup my hands & let
sea-spray trickle down
lines in my palms,
pooling the last image
of my father: wheat stalk thin,
eyes crowed with sorrow.
He stands on bare sub-floor,
& this morning’s
grey sunrise pours
through a veined window
in the only home I’ve ever known.
People I don’t know sleep
in my boyhood bedroom
& in the yard we once played catch in.
In his extended hand:
a seventeen-year-old birth certificate
from a place I’ve never known.
His eyes are wet with words
his lips won’t say:
“jump ship.”
Overdosed
Across the street, a chorus sings to the faint
beat of my pulse—calls dibs
on who gets what.
A fly lands on my cheek
only to lift off,
surprised by my blinking eye
and thin, warm skin.
The fly suspects
what I do:
my last words—a quiet falsetto—
trapped here,
on this bus shelter’s glass wall,
etched under
and next to names
who sat here (or there),
because there was no
other place.
They waited
in a place of waiting
with nothing
and left behind
their names
and the dates they left
the place of waiting.
A harmony of crows now and
the fly’s hum,
I wonder if the crows
send the fly
to check for life?
How much blood
have they seen
stain eyes,
pool in this bus stop?
Did they chisel
these names and dates
by beak
on these glass walls
so when I stitched
myself with opium’s
needle, I’d know
I wasn’t alone?
An ambulance
rocks the curb,
straddles the sidewalk
before its brakes
hiss to a stop.
Through the glass
where my name
should be: two men,
one stretcher,
all three pause
to say,
He’s alive.