The Bread We Eat in Dreams

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