Day Four-The Strandline

 

Mermaid’s Purse and Heart Urchin Photos by Andy MacGregor

Heart urchin

Was it a spring storm,
surging over headlands,
barrelling across dunes
and breaking

the steady rhythm of the shore
in its season of accumulation
that brought this buried
treasure to the surface?

It’s given me pause
to think how something so fragile –
this hollow chimaera
of porcelain and lace –

could withstand it here
out in the open, a coast
ruthless and unfeeling
as the sea before it,

yet fall to pieces
in my clumsy hands.

-Andy MacGregor 

-M.S. Evans (part five of photo and poetic sequence first published by IceFloe Press “Butte, America” – Poems and photos by M.S. Evans – IceFloe Press

THE STRANDLINE 

Beyond high tide’s reach
a pile of debris lies dumped,
like trench tools,
by a retreating army.

Salt-blistered steaming seaweed,
softly sea-blasted driftwood, tangles
with net remnants, snags of plastic,
scribbles of fishing line.

The Prickly Saltwort;
tolerant but not user friendly,
stodges each conversation
like groynes holding back the tide.

The fresh-water folk by contrast, are young;
new-blood vibrant.
Lloyd has four years left to retirement;
he will grind them out doing things his way.

Runes etched on the reaper’s blade read ‘Budget Cuts’.
Lloyd does not work for Corporate,
his service doesn’t generate income;
he’s below the strandline.

Beyond high tide’s reach
a pallid pile of paper-thin people
pretend
to care what happens him.

A tiny Octopus lurches
from this tidal refuse pile
toward rock-pools;
safety of shallows.

A Seagull watches from Sales.
Like Tom Cruise in Top Gun,
The Stevester takes to the air;

-John Wolf 27th July 2021.

Sea Star

From a finback whale’s whisper
she is born of a storm
in an estuary, torn
between ocean and sky

A girl of sea stars
she clings to clouds
but always returns
to the call of the deep

In life, she craves love
found in two places,
tears herself
from celeste to sea

In neither, complete

---

-Lisa Alletson

A Strandline

I welcome the abandoned, discarded
and lost. My creatures scavenge arrivals.
Sandhoppers hide in day under stranded
debris, emerge to feed when darkness calls.

Find in me ambergris from a sperm whales
intestines, sea beans, coconuts and sea
hearts, plastic packaging and nurdles,
egg capsules of sharks, skates and rays, spongy

pale whelk egg cases, cuttlebones, moulted
crab shells. I am never the same. Four tides
change my shape, what I am, how I’m molded.
I can’t hold on to you, others decide.

I’m not permanent, secure or stable.
Have to let you go. Inevitable

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Lisa Alletson

grew up in South Africa and the UK, and now lives in Canada. She has poetry forthcoming or published in New Ohio Review, The Lumiere Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, SilverBirch Press, Bangalore Review, Beyond Words, Osmosis Press, and Dodging the Rain. She writes daily on Twitter at @LotusTongue.

-M.S. Evans

is a Pushcart nominated poet and visual artist residing in Butte, Montana. Her work has appeared in Black Bough Poetry, Ice Floe Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Feral, Fevers of the Mind, and Green Ink Poetry, among others.

Twitter: @SeaNettleInk

Instagram: @seanettleart

-Julian Brasington

lives in North Wales.  His poems have appeared most recently in Ink Sweat & Tears, Stand, Ink Drinkers Poetry, Channel, Dust, Dreich, Black Bough Poetry, and in the newspaper Morning Star.