A place to stand, a lever

by Ankh Spice

Courtney Hall

On the beach, three children have conjured a world. The castle survived an afternoon

century of siege, and is ancient now, shadow longing toward the water. A fence of feathers

is still flying a boundary between his necessary graveyard, her garden. Careful seashell tombstones

and careful seashell pathways, from this angle shine the same—white bone, broken patterns.

The youngest child, banished for the chaos he carried so loosely, terraformed the badlands at the edge

of the tide. That far country is dangerous, tunnel and collapse, channel and mountain. But the three

are safe in the tearooms, powers combined to manifest ice-cream. It does not matter to them now

that the great flood they surely knew was coming, is coming. The driftwood has sailed too long

and is heavy, and who can ever carry enough for a buttress, and who could ever dam away

a whole sea, but one long piece it leaps to the hand  like a wand. And I do believe that I too,

I too was once a strong magic spell just barely contained inside a skin.

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Ankh Spice is a queer-identified, sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry has been published in a fair number of places over the last year, online and in print, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He co-edits for Ice Floe Press and is a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine. If he’s not out on the coast, you’ll find him and a lot of sea-photography on Twitter @SeaGoatScreams, on Facebook @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry, and much of his published work on his linktree