Today's poem is by Stephen Massimilla

Oil Flew Into the Sea
       

and some of it was on fire,
as were the men ejected into the air by their own depth charges.

It takes a hundred pounds of high-octane gas to announce this end.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The dead silent Icelandic charter, The Snow,
out in the North Atlantic for forty-six days

in the air gap south of Greenland.

In my night trance, I'm the man beyond the reach of waking:
Hidden in the dreamed sailor's sinking pocket, a minute atlas
with a tiny map

of New York in it; in his faraway locker, a yellow postcard

of a prismatic woman with a scorpion cross
pinned to each wrist. His closest shipmate doesn't love her,
doesn't even know her in person,

nor what to make of my longed-for light, sliver-moon
of her torso
bulleted with diamonds

against the high-pitched banners of red sirens,
an unreachable city riddled with sickness and desire.

I'd better have laid a pink rubber mat on the bed
before wishing and shaking so much
that I wake up in a pool of water.

Of the people I thought I loved,
I see two paddling on a strafed ocean as vast as God's hand.

They clasp, and I drift away, my face sunk in my burst-open fists.

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Copyright © 2023 Stephen Massimilla All rights reserved
from Frank Dark
Barrow Street Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission