POETRY
By Luke Johnson and Megan Merchant
For M,
We could talk about the baby humpback who washed ashore with a belly of trash
and the net used for catching thousands of fish. How children circled to see its slick
skin flake in the sun of California and the birds, so many of them, glob flesh then
raise it back like ruin, one after the other after the other. We could stand around
watching the wonder dim as sea diminishes, while parents snap photos and point
and crawl into its gaping mouth, to pull out giant teeth. But yesterday, while my
daughter danced in a dead field, flowers choked by soot, my son came running
with a bullet in his hand and before I had time to take it, stuck it in his mouth and
said it tasted like lemons. Kant would argue a seed of violence spreads in silence
until, too late, a boy is beckoned to break apart beauty and scatter it. That as it
blooms his song diminishes and all chances of goodness are gone. That night I put
the bullet in a pocket of mud, and as I planted it heard my son cry, the sting on his
tongue: throbbing. Why am I telling you this? I stood before the shell of that beast
on that day in July and whispered sorry as I told my son spit, his mouth flooded
with ruin. Imagined its mother a mile off the coast, circling—her panicked calls.
Nothing but shadows and shadows.
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.
Photo by David Di Veroli.