Dead Horse Bay

I remember when the cold hit Barren Island. It came from the east, across the open sea, and pressed like a hand at my back as I rode the Friday ferry, hurrying me home for the weekend. It seemed to still the smell, the cold, and hold it in one place. I could have drawn a line around it, or marked where it started and stopped. I suppose that’s what I do when I remember you, too.

Portrait of the Artist as a Headless Dutch Boy

I carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand.  I picked out seaweed and shells.     

WATER WATER EVERYWHERE my doll, my decapitation

is very political. My ass burns

on the roof of a Cadillac.

Pink wind, cold sun. In this quiet light,

you watch her roam the bay. You produce

a solitary prayer—bodega rose, talisman.

I call out that I’ve found a bone, a spinal vertebra perhaps, and I begin to pull away the seaweed and sand crabs from where the marrow once was. The friend I've brought here appears at my side and I hand him the horse bone. He turns it over in his hand; it looks more like wood than bone from years of being tossed and aged in the bay. We keep pawing through the broken bottles and tinker toys littering the shore and find a very bone looking bone: long and thin in the middle and bulbous on the ends, like a dog toy or a bone you’d see in a cartoon. We are preoccupied with this carnal treasure hunt. We have done the remarkable: we have found a certain joy in death.

The circumstances of separation, the severing of fin from torso, were simple. It began slow and subtle. The rot spread from scale to scale, made the iridescent shine of her tail dull. Summer slipped into fall, the rot continued its advance unnoticed. During winter, the cold slowed the process of decay. But as the waters warmed again, spring then summer, she could no longer ignore the rapid rate at which her body altered. How had it started, this change, this disassembly of parts?

1.

It isn’t really a stop, but when I ask him to, the bus driver’s happy to drop me off just before the bridge, right across from the old airfield.

I follow the dirt path on foot. Dry grasses with dun-colored seed-fringes sway in the wind. Low bushes twist knee-height, laden with red winter berries. Everything here is sparse and tight. Salt-stunted growth. The way is turning to sand. I climb the hill and the sky opens to water.

When the cars on the overpass      see me

it will be          out of context—knee deep in a bay
lined with horse bones         sorting my nets

as one prepares the body for sleep.

Editors' note: This story was written for Underwater New York's January 24 event at Winter Shack, a temporary exhibition space designed by Alex Branch and Nicole Antebi, who curate a series of site-specific installations/readings/exhibitions that encourage audiences to engage with one another's work and to build community in the darkest hours of the year.  

I once went to a New Year’s Eve party whose host, a burlesque dancer, handed each guest a dinner plate
to smash against a brick wall. I’ve never seen a roomful of people so suddenly awake, so reborn. Of course,
that was years ago, before we lost Brooklyn, before they came for Queens.

On the small kitchen table lay a set of objects: a vial of pills that looked prescription but bore no prescription; the scuffed cover of a punk CD of unknown origin; and one of the manuals, the writing on its cardboard cover Sharpie-scrawled and illegible. Like the pills, it had arrived from her mother the previous day. Vera Schiele Obek stood over it all, eyeing the items and wondering what the coming voyage would hold.

For all the ghost horses haunting Dead Horse Bay, this was made for an Underwater New York event as part of Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess Art in SoHo, April 21, 2016.

So it was written: the deeps covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone.

It goes like this. One person was chasing another. The sea split. There was a door. There was a crossing.
From one side to the other. Then the door slammed. It slammed in the face of the chaser.  He was hit.
He was sunk. He went down.

1.
pure silver

it only feels right sometimes
when the moon comes in and the concrete
swells like waves

the scent of inland grasses
much sweeter than this sand

sometimes when the summer feels
just so
and the wind catches you
by the ankles