Rockwell Kent

The rain outside the cave is wet, cold and
doesn’t resemble anything
other than rain,
no matter how long or how hard I look.
In the morning, after digging with our bare hands all night,
we’ll be hungry: once the storm abates
we can try to catch some fish
one man volunteers and begins collecting driftwood, piling it
near the mouth of the cave.
The sand is loose and dry and doesn’t hold our tracks.
Our footprints shift and dissolve in a riot of peaks and divots.
Wind shear down the mountain, louder than a freight train,
ruffles the leaden surface of the surging bay.
I was working on my third sketch
when the barometric pressure started to drop.
The boat listed, I went below.
The storm grew worse. Through a porthole
I watched the heave of charcoal sea summit the grey horizon,
obscure the benign bureaucracy of shore.

The water edge recedes, up and down the beach
exposed. It looks like
south of the point the weather improves.
On the peninsula they might not be aware of the conditions here,
or might expect bad weather here,
and be in the habit of staying west of the headland.
That could be why we saw no other boats, coming in from the east.

Officials at the border detained me
as I was leaving Germany:
ideal socialist state
confiscates my drawings.
The tawdry aftermath was a letdown.
Permits were obtained,
and I drank punishing Greek wine
at a sidewalk café while waiting for my train.

A woodcut of a boy, in the expressionistic style,
officials thought concealed a map
of coastal defenses.
Whatever my unconscious mind,
conspiring with my hand, left for others to find
in the harsh geometry of his face
was a glacial matter:
trace of friction that left behind
a record of the gouge, every pass a tiny cirque,
the border of each shape
a terminal moraine where sharpened concave blade
pushed darkness up and sloughed it off, to excavate the hollows of his cheeks,
and brush a gentle light on his brow-ridge and his temples;
from a time long before the boy,
much further back in time,
peeling the darkness off in strips.

Skipper says the man didn’t have family.
Skipper checked, before we left.
So skipper says.

We understand the cold body of the sailor
when we pick it up to move it.
Our pulses strong enough that our shirts have dried on our backs
like shirts over hot stones.
The dead body stayed cold in wet clothes.

Leaf Pile…Particle Board…Indent (Walking It Off)

A head-on collision in the median ditch
Left me
A titanic hood ornament
Swan diving over my pickup’s front end,
Arms and legs akimbo,
My eyes

Blue safety glass spider crack
Shrink-wrapped,

            Tint from the laminate bluing
The spires of some conifers high on a ridge where the road engineers
            Blasted through limestone, the trees
Coming closer and spinning like vertical columns of side-brushes
Car washes use, or dervishes
Dressed up in foam
Fingered, fringed ghillie suits.

When I finally come
To rest
Like a paratrooper, my silk parachute
Canopy
Snagged in the canopy
Branches, I’m
Trussed and suspended in harness,
Thick nylon straps cleaving numb buttocks
Still buzzed with nerve damage;
The ground might as well be a mile down,
Perfect end
To the floor routine
Of my dreams
So close….
I stuck something
All right,
But it wasn’t the landing and
Plunged in the petrified stew of prehistory, core
Sampled by drilling or augur,
A stake driven
Through the heart of this vampire
That’s Time,
By the hand of a vampire who hunts
Vampires,
I can feel the sensations below
Diffusing and wicking away like reverse capillarity,
Second and third generations of roots
Grown off the taproot
A mandrake produces to anthropomorphic
Effect, where the semen was spilled by the hanging of innocent men,
But gravity’s promise deferred, and walking
It off, by walking in place,
I just swivel around like a spindle with fins,
Agitate ghosts of the bivalves, crustaceans, and cephalopods
Suspended like fossils in air that is thicker
Than gelatin, one more ingredient added to stock flavored
With orange zest, fennel, and saffron,
The main attraction in
Someone’s ectoplasmic bouillabaisse.

Mark Parsons’ poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Blood + Honey Lit, Eulogy Press, The Gorko Gazette, Pixelated Shroud, and Argyle Lit. His books include, Stills (Southernmost Books in 2023), Lake Tahoe is an Elegy (chapbook, Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Spiral (Anxiety Press, 2025), and The Kingdom of Middle of Children (Southernmost Books, forthcoming, summer 2025). He lives in Tucson, Arizona.   

2 poems by Mark Parsons is the second featured piece in the Urban Pigs Press CASTAWAYS callout, which celebrates the release of the latest Urban Pigs title Robinson Crusoe Maybe by guest editor Colin Gee. Colin is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette and author of several books.