THE LEVIATHAN

BRANDON SHANE

I stood in the storming tide as dirt crumbled

to the shafts of water below me, breaking coastline

as steam takes stagnant water to the sky:

my father a bird’s nest in this urn.

Fire had scurried his bones into powder, decades

of flesh and blood within my open palm

overseeing the spirited cries of an ocean

without its wailing gulls’ or dolphins’ march.

It burned with white heat: streaks of diamonds

as the clouds burrowed with black smoke

and tortured silver. Father hung at the edge:

where life is matter of solitude: a dangling chair.

Finned ghouls suffering immortality

suspended below seaweed with emerald sockets

& glum skin that slides with oily disgust.

I felt a fowl vibration and then looked behind,

the church at the edge of another bluff

erupts into flames, bell rings once in tremor

and then crashes into a sacred dome

no less holy than driftwood.

I promised to bury him in the twilight of man

as kelp rose where land has previously denied,

where religious scrolls had been forgotten,

and all the caverns of winged mythos

that had been buried by erosion. The Pacific

trembled and divided into a gulch, as water

became sand collapsing into a hole. I stopped:

around me thunder and wheezing lungs

of uprooted vegetation. I hear the world here

all at once, bridges snapped to a void

& a creature rising with an extinct breadth:

a billion voices, dead languages, linguists.

There is music that we have heard long ago

choruses from a place before conception,

father and I returning to the primordial ooze

once been: some place only the mountains know.

Brandon Shane is an alum of California State University, Long Beach, where he majored in English. He works as a writing instructor and substitute teacher. You can see his work in the Berlin Literary Review, Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Livina Press, Bitterleaf Books, Remington Review, Discretionary Love, among many others.