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Three
Poems
by
Josh Anthony
Xinland
Part 1
Author
#3
A
man with a strange baseball cap
followed me to the docks
where
I sat with my notebook.
His seat was a creaking board,
his
first word was a sigh,
then, you ever been deep
sea
fishing? as if we’d been friends
for years,
catching up on the catches,
Baker
#3
I
took a long shift today
because I can’t stand being
home.
After work, I walked with my
apron on to the docks
where
I saw two men I think
I recognize sitting by the
water.
A boat weighted down with fish
glubbed to its
parking spot,
Tourist
#2
The
ocean here is like another
citizen, everyone talks about
it
with a pronoun and a stare,
I look back at my time
spent
in The States, where
the closest thing we felt
were the
streets, the hobble
and cracked asphalt, the material
name
itself mocking us. Here,
Fisherman
#1
The
boat took a less than huge hit
but I still slipped ‘nd
landed on my back,
so the wool of my sweater bruised,
still
got the fish ‘nd
hauled ‘em back to port, so
Tourist
#1
They
all speak in threads,
what I mean is they say
“so”
a lot, it always
comes out as sew,
like
the Canadians’ and their
ayes; it’s always
so this,
so that, so up your shirt.
I might find myself
using it
the longer I’m here,
trying to sew
what
I’ve reaped.
we
can at least eat tonight, least
we can still wake up to the
greasy
patches stuck to the cast iron, a
slight fire
grumbling in the pot-belly stove,
so my wife can still flick
scales
while I watch her hair crisp
from the vaporized
salt.
though,
the connection to the sea
has no limit, it’s where life
starts,
with the entering tide, where life
dips out, while
the waves retreat.
Even the forests
have oceanic qualities,
the branches
of a birch swaying in the night
being pulled
by the croon of the moon.
I spend lengths of time
in their
forests, just trying
not to think of people’s
hearts
beating.
some
fish struggled still
as the net heaved with the
weight of a
dead stump
into a truck. On the way
home, a rabbit dashed
into
the glum forest.
so
I swam with it,
knowing he was a foreigner,
the
Xinlind life is based
on the sea, if I
hadn’t been
out there deep
I don’t think I’d be
a citi-xin,
I smiled,
he didn’t catch this inside
joke, his face
reflected
the calm water. He sighed
Fisherman’s
Wife #1
I
sat up all night
reading The
Odyssey
while he
slept in bed.
He thinks
I wake up early, I
just
never go to bed an’
sleep when he leaves
so I
won’t be up
wondering if today’s
when
he floats to shore.
as
a light wake lapped
against the seaweed crusted
piers of
the dock.
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