Like Ruin

Like Ruin

POETRY

By Luke Johnson and Megan Merchant

For M,

 

We could talk about the baby hump­back who washed ashore with a belly of trash
and the net used for catch­ing thou­sands of fish. How chil­dren circled to see its slick
skin flake in the sun of Cal­i­for­nia and the birds, so many of them, glob flesh then
raise it back like ruin, one after the other after the other. We could stand around
watch­ing the wonder dim as sea dimin­ish­es, while parents snap photos and point
and crawl into its gaping mouth, to pull out giant teeth. But yes­ter­day, while my
daugh­ter danced in a dead field, flowers choked by soot, my son came running
with a bullet in his hand and before I had time to take it, stuck it in his mouth and
said it tasted like lemons. Kant would argue a seed of vio­lence spreads in silence
until, too late, a boy is beck­oned to break apart beauty and scatter it. That as it
blooms his song dimin­ish­es and all chances of good­ness are gone. That night I put
the bullet in a pocket of mud, and as I planted it heard my son cry, the sting on his
tongue: throb­bing. Why am I telling you this? I stood before the shell of that beast
on that day in July and whis­pered sorry as I told my son spit, his mouth flooded
with ruin. Imag­ined its mother a mile off the coast, circling—her pan­icked calls.
Nothing but shadows and shadows.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by David Di Veroli.



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