by SUZI MEZEI
They dot the silica-fringe like the dowdy remnants
of Halloween, the size of small fists, a shanty of
abandoned carbonate shacks; evidence of interior
lives. An urchin’s derelict house disintegrates, its
papuled walls splinter, slide merciless into bare skin;
your taught heel, padded toes un-socked, shoeless,
raw, ever on the move stops short, pivots and a
fevered breeze shimmies on miniscule punctures.
A dram of you pools red in sea-steeped sand, you
surrender the blood your body made like unceded
land, it spouts from somewhere deep within
your topography, while shards of shell inject dead
salt and microbial dregs of foreign lives from the
aqueous basin of Port Phillip Bay; the ancient
biology of the beach is embedded inside
you through accidental lacerations.