2.

                  How speak to the ancestors? Waves roll in, plane sand. Sand
                                     mirrors a gull’s low glide. How

                        let them speak through us?

                                      Put the stone in your mouth. Taste
                                 the almost-smoothed-to-nothing word. Gull

          chases gull, trying to steal its catch (dogwhelk or cockle). Meat
                                                                                that made its shell
falls back into the sea: tumbling mineral tongue
                 that secretes the shell into being. Language
                                                                as home, grown

   out of the body, to shield the body from everything happening at once?

              Seawrack orange peel clouds skipped flat stones through blue
                         snake writhe of loose sand across repetitive crack
                 of a gull’s beak expanding

                                                  the tiny perceptual hole.

                                 Some kind of black magic protection spell?

Christien Gholson  | Tidal Flats 3
Contents | Mudlark No. 63 (2017)