Myth Happens

The afternoon's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #80, containing my poem "Fair Exchange." It wraps up the numbers issue, showcasing the fiction and poetry of CL Hellisen, Francesca Forrest, Zhihua Wang, Rebekah Postupak, and more. Mine has to do with the debits and credits of the drowned; it may have been set off by a Phoenician papyrus and owes more to sea-rise. It was the first poem I wrote all this sleep-deprived summer. Pick up a copy, start counting.

Aptly for the nautical connection, it arrived just in time for International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I cannot prove any piracy in the history of my salt-green onion bottle, but it came from the late seventeenth century by way of a river's mouth in the Caribbean. It wasn't for sale the first time I saw it in the window of the China Sea Marine Trading Company in Portland, where my brother agreed with me that it looked like one of Bootstrap Bill's empties. Two weeks later the proprietors had reconsidered and at the end of a dawn o'clock round trip, it came home with me wrapped in a calyx of newspaper and a strawberry-pink plastic bag from J.C. Penney with a Gordon Bok CD thrown in. A greenwing macaw watched the transaction; her name was Singapore. The bottle worked its way directly into "The Salt House" (2007) and has reappeared since in "As the Tide Came Flowing In" (2022). I photographed it before heading out into the overcast which feels like a storm about to break and better soon.

( I am seized by your arrow at the broken-hearted seam. )

I wish the vast majority of my e-mail right now were not spam from the Democratic Party. They are really not in danger of losing my vote, only my patience.