8.

	    Low tide, spring tide, distant white line of waves out there,
					                           across a vast stretch of cold mud. 
				  Do I have enough change for wine?

	 I’m just another body on this beach. Snails, cockles, lugworms, me — 
			                                                            meat scouring wet sand.

	  				     one pound fifty-two       fuck 

	       Follow snail tracks through wet sand to the sea: seafoam 
					                                     frozen into piles of slush. 

        Friday means nothing when there’s no work to count the days down
					                            to your allotted two days of freedom.

     What is it I’m hunting, really? Crow 
						        tries to land on a black rock,
				  	                          battered back into the air by the wind. 

	    Does he know how to breathe the end in? 
	       What lungs and heart can contain it?

		       Air pops through wet sand from a lugworm hole 
				                                  as water slips back into another wave.
Where is that black stone, shaped like a tongue,
						        I found last fall? Black stone language

							                     forever lost?

		    Dive down  
			                   find the song the lugworm taught the dead

Christien Gholson  | Tidal Flats 9
Contents | Mudlark No. 63 (2017)