OUR HUMAN SHORES
Bursting inside the seasons there were moistures and colors and vibrating browns. Orange engulfing the shape of things. At the pinnacle, spaces where magma suddenly becomes a floe. Pulchritude greens into verdant perfumes. Azures beyond the comprehensible sea. But then the barnacles manacled our journey, demanded their blood rite with their corpses. Ghosts bled int the edges where we write our ending.
What exists in solitude cannot be forgiven cannot be touched—my lesions were blessed—caressed certain. Larch leaves shed, leaving bare the yellow waiting to smoke another tribulation. A sweet grey of stardust—enervated rage. Chthonic, shiny death.
OUR HUMAN SHORES
Reckoner, will the rescue come like a sough or crack the tree in two? This dilemma questions it footing, meaning something you want to have meaning, but undermines your roots. The moment we face loss, our regrets escape the high-water mark and overtake the parts we allow to be loved. Admit you are uncomfortable, let go of your rope. Focus on moving parts integral to connect our lives into hirsute apostrophe. I’m not here. I’m not telling you what to do. And yet—
OUR HUMAN SHORES
I choke on my fetid heart. My clog of mythic order. This belligerent maxim.
It’s not enough to plead, not enough to make that which is wrong, right, or slightly more. Like fox pouncing on mice, we become too deliberate, too afraid of life.
I peel my ventricles meticulously. Bleed my promise to come home into tomorrow.
Biographical Statement
Josh Fomon's first book, Though We Bled Meticulously, was published by Black Ocean. New poems from "Our Human Shores" have appeared in or are forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor, DIAGRAM, The Destroyer, The Georgia Review, Heavy Feather Review, Paperbark, Poetry Northwest, Provincetown Arts, TYPO, and Vestiges. Josh lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in Seattle. His second book, Our Human Shores, will be published by Black Ocean in 2025.