The Whisky Blot
Journal of Literature, Poetry, and Haiku
The angry waves crash over me
And knock me down Rolling Spinning Until I’m shaken Like a martini. I can’t touch the ground Or tell up from down So it’s possible that I’m floating Or I might be drowning But either way I can’t breathe. The sky has vanished As the breakers Refuse to relinquish their grip on me. Their tentacles Snake around my body And I struggle for air But instead, each gasp fills my lungs with briny water That stifles my cries for help. Soon, the fight seeps out of me And I tumble endlessly into darkness. Suddenly, something slams into my back I force my eyes open To find a life raft that has manifested like an apparition And whether it’s real or not I reach for it and pull myself in Just as the raging sea Comes for me. The swells lift me higher and higher Until I’m sure I’ve touched the sky And I’m now at the top of the crest Suspended between heaven and earth Where I reach for the clouds So tantalizingly close That I want to crawl over and curl up in them But without warning, like a roller coaster I plunge Slapping down hard as I’m baptized by the sea. I realize that the life raft has disappeared And I struggle to stand up Staggering like an air dancer at a used car lot As I wobble to the shore While the tide laps benignly at my feet Where I sink onto the warm sand And breathe. Nancy Machlis Rechtman has had poetry and short stories published in Paper Dragon, The Bluebird Word, Quail Bell, Blue Lake Review, Goat’s Milk, The Writing Disorder, Discretionary Love, and more. She wrote freelance Lifestyle stories for a local newspaper, and she was the copy editor for another paper She writes a blog called Inanities at https://nancywriteon.wordpress.com. Comments are closed.
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