down toward his sweet, fragile gills
fluttering under the world like a heartbeat.
In 1985
I was six,
learning to swim around my father’s boat
in a black, black lake
outside Seattle, where the pine roots
wound down into the black,
black mud.
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The Justice League
had left us. The boy under the sea
(Ichtiander, 1928)
(Arthur Curry, 1959)
wore orange scales and his wife didn’t
love him anymore. The orcas who loved him said:
Hey, man, the eighties are gonna be
tough for everyone. Do what makes you happy.
Mars is always invading.
Eat fish. Dive deep.
Or.
Khrushchev took a crystal submarine
down to those iron cupolas
where the boy under the sea wore his
only suit
and made salt tea in a coral samovar
for the Premier
who wanted to talk about his coin collection
and the possibility
of a New Leningrad under the Barents pack ice