The banks look like a Goodwill store
washed up, clothes everywhere
Our bodies run down to the surf
shells bubble out of the sand
Salt teeth bite at our ankles
then our labia, breasts and eyes
We are fifty-six laughing
little islands of loamy flesh
We wash up onto the sand
pink and glinting in the sun
We find our clothes, soft as homespun,
warm as August dunes of sand
Four fire-lords build a circular blaze
that sways and rises to meet us
We too rise and sway, huddled
like fur weanlings at the breast
our chests rising and falling in sync
our smiles lit up and flickering.
We raise a sunny, rubicund cone
high, high into and through the fog
We shout, laugh and cry
firelit eyes each a salty ocean
We release it with smoke into the chill air
and dissolve into dance and drums
and silent pairs, trudging up the banks
trailing bits of circle as we go.
Mo Lynn Stoycoff is a writer and visual artist whose poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Rise Up Review, The American Journal of Poetry, California Quarterly, Speckled Trout Review and many other journals and anthologies. Mo works in the performing arts and lives in Central California.
South Broadway Ghost Society 