Sailor and the Vegas Strip
by Olivia Drury
An Icarus with chipped indigo polish
was found mangled in the parking lot.
“Sleep’s a leach, eating’s a recital,”
that’s what he told the butchered Pepsi bottle,
then died beside it.
He wilted in rhombus slices for years.
He smelled like a public pool.
Old scallop-eyes unfurled like a vapor strike,
pressed up against the rib slats, a selkie:
grace-corked of girls and no stranger of men
in a slime of her lesser sins, good and languid,
give her him
in tender diagonals of surplus and starving,
give him her
veil of permission to praise a flesh as verity,
a giving
unhuman, haunting the floors of their
evacuating fanfare.
The halcyon kneecap, the capsized tongue,
he’s a sailor—
his quilt swaddled comatose so unlike
the insatiable cipher of her shallow current,
the recital that makes pavement baubles of men.
She was born on the loudest day.
She never heard what nothing sounds like.
But sleep he leaches and eating he leaches and
dinner he made of his spleen, crowding slots
where only kernels of her coast had stirred him—
when did his vulgar revelry become a vaudeville?
The Aegean’s the sharpest of skins,
his spine snapped to salt her sea.
He was the sorrow we saw coming.