All the myths go back to the beach. All the histories and biologies congregate there. Take the lab, for instance, science and its sureness. Take a compound. H2O. Crack it open. Lay its bonds on the table. Ask it in chemists’ Greek. που είναι—pou eínai. This is the gorgon. Half-bodied conundrum. Water, acid and base, crystalline fluid. Woman holding a ship in one hand, an anchor in the other. You can never be just one thing. A body or what it leaks. Drink.
Diffuse. On this road of sunken bones. At the bottom, liquid lulls light into sleep. Vast openness. Beach floor of coral and anemone, unaware of the immortal engine thrashing overhead. Sea-spray, becomes river, becomes rain, becomes ether in your shattered cup. It freezes. Expands. Breaks the mug. Falls to earth and melts, feeds sequoia and sapling. Their roots understand how to tug at the atom. Atom itself shimmering, hydronium to hydroxide, this molecular movement mirroring the tide. Constantly ripping itself open. Sewing itself back together. A kind of erosion that fuels eternity. Have you dipped your nakedness into the sea? I have. It wounds me.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared in Blue Earth Review, West Trade Review, Ergon, The Decadent Review, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.
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