early morning dive
into mourning this
creation
is amiss
two cigarettes and the imperfect pink
horizon
beyond my apartment
already a blue blank
game board
two sips of yesterday's coffee
reheated
and I know the umbrella girl
painted on my cup
pouring Morton salt
behind her wherever she goes
knows more about this world
than me
/
I'm afraid to go in afraid to go
back to sleep to sink
or swim the above-ground pool of sharks
lost
inside the current of this gyre
instead I deep-end roar like the air
conditioner box
below my deck
dying down
every few minutes
argue against the disappearance
of clouds
awash somewhere above
the surface
of the ocean
40 miles from uptown New Orleans
where I sit safe above sea level
afraid for my friends
ten feet below
my reach
/
sky carry me with you out to open water
drop me in
the shark cage of your two blue hands
show me the first fears loved ones face
every morning
floating
and I'll fend off the sharks for them
live underwater
or carry them back to my apartment
fill a tank with salt
and faucet water
to fall asleep beside
reading this myth of sun and wanderlust
I'll wake early
feed each a pound of blood
/
when the gulf sends its ships
in again
the ocean sleeps in our beds
sings its song
on the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain
bends its back like a memory
in the river a few blocks down
every street
we keep noting nothing
is extinct
as if every time we keep remembering
Yeats
his body disinterred in France
and brought back to Ireland
on the deck of a battleship
/
it doesn't take a hurricane to hit
for this to happen
just a miss
/
the instructions have yet to be written
authored by destruction
fixed grid
we are so eager
to destroy
when there's nothing left
to explore
a literate lie
a transmission meant
to be intercepted
by the enemy
so close to me
we are sinking
together
and that's love
until we
defeat glory
and assemble
the quieted urges
to remain
afloat
\
for now
the sea may still falsely claim
the beginning
for now
our locations
are remote
and mysteries
can only
be uncovered
by screams
\
scream ship
oppose me
for a turn or two
i've neglected
our opposition
in favor of a navy
that admired the illusion
of endless
sea
\
no war should be downloaded
no love should be uploaded
synch both
to blood and casualty
or a coded cipher
that woke
you to the final
version of yourself
trying to save
the world minimum
that could guarantee
survival
\
synch
a fire
at sea
pyre
empire
okay
to disconnect
\
our digital immersion
recent dense archiving
saline as sea
life updated by the second
so we say so much less
when we meet
how's it been going?
i've seen
i may have hid
you
as i have to hide
my
life spared
like these ships
when their location
is mist
when only a direct hit
is worth losing for
the chance to turn
the bottom
into a grave
where love is left
able embalmed barely breathing
a depth most ships
wouldn't dream to attend
usually it's captains
not their vessels
that are hell bent
on sinking
but a few ships aspire
to capsize
for the possibility
a steel reach
attempts a truce
with the abyss
in 1989 we hadn't traveled
across what
the grownups called
the new bridge
the Mississippi was just a river
where monsters lived
the place I imagined
the dead man
I dreamt inside
my momma's waterbed
drowned
when I slept there
because my daddy was drunk
as a Roethke poem
dancing fist-first
with his brothers
the night I never woke up
/
in 1990 the TV loved me
in The Abyss
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
searched
the VCR for a submarine lost
among aquatic aliens
my finger on stop
I searched my heart
for the grownup
darkness
that wanted her
to drown to death
to choose
to breathe water
so Ed Harris could rip her shirt
open
expose her bare chest
pound and pound and pound
every time I watched her die
I wanted her to live
/
in 1991 I moved
from Memphis
to Arkansas
on my mother's lap
the big U-Haul
loaded with all our cargo
felt like it floated
over the Mississippi
across the new bridge
while the trestles of the old
sat silent
in their fatherly distance
and past that the railroad cars
unmoved by our journey
I imagine now were filled
with dead men
playing Battleship
still as bridges
transferring
all their weight onto the end
where they are strongest
\
These three poems are excerpted from the Unlikely Book by Vincent A. Cellucci and Christopher Shipman, _a ship on the line.
Vincent Cellucci wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited the exceptional poetry anthology Fuck Poems (Lavender Ink, 2012). Come back river, his first chapbook, a bilingual Bengali-English translation collaboration with the poet and artist Debangana Banerjee is recently available from Finishing Line Press.
Christopher Shipman's forthcoming work includes a chapbook of short prose pieces, The Movie My Murderer Makes (The Cupboard), and co-authored with Brett Evans, The T. Rex Parade (Lavender Ink). His poems appear in journals such as Cimarron Review, PANK, and Salt Hill, among many others. Shipman lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter and teaches English literature and creative writing to high school kids.
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