Like the gulls prickling the simmering surface
you surrendered into water:
lending shadow to silvering fish,
their flickers of nakedness,
bands of seaweeds tourniqueting
the ramshackle tides
that locked you
on barnacle-scarred rocks.
Your wind-wrapped shouts
smothering in the carry over
to the sleepy salt-lipped town
kissing the ocean, the air turning brittle
on the dig of shoe prints sprawled across
the beach like a hemorrhage.
Sunset swam up your backs
like an old surgery
as you turned over misshapen rocks,
their ridges, their ripple of staircases,
dug nails under mottled grey shells
into translucent bags of supermarket plastic
with ankles buried
in water working its way
to your tendons. Shouted
in fingerless black;
the limb-losing darkness,
though the wind had knocked
the timbre out of your voices
and the waves were spitting you back
when you kicked yourselves
forward.
Fresh off the boat you would see the
journey for weeks when you sleep,
the thin mattress smelling like salt,
kitchen grease,
above the restaurant in the attic
with a nest of moths and
every time you heard their flutter
you dreamed of white sails,
the thought like scraping mud
from your palms,
like a baptism of bitter
waters,
and when they discovered you
in the crack of light
it would never cross their minds
that what the waves carried
saccharine sad over the cold
did only return
to the lines of your skin
like nested swallows
for they also looked up at the sky
and kept its blue.
On February 5, 2004, twenty-one Chinese workers died on Morecambe Bay by the rising tide under illegal employment to pick cockles. One worker, speaking little English, was only able to say “sinking water” to Emergency Services by mobile phone before being cut off.
