The sea surrounding them they barely knew;
the fog was constant. Sirens trailed the violence
through the hills but taught them silence.
Their son would learn to walk along these avenues.
Date night downtown: they slipped into a fugue
of cocktailed youth they hoped to hold against
the rising tide of parenthood, the rents.
They parked a car where once there'd just been dunes.
Earthquakes whispered up their trees.
They read of ships left crewless in the harbor
whose wreckage stretched the nation's western bounds.
Once their child ran heedless into the sea.
Their front porch shrugged and split its mortar.
Occasionally they dreamt the other drowned.
The Ghost Ship by Derek Mong | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Derek Mong is the author of three poetry collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes, The Identity Thief, and When the Earth Flies into the Sun (2024)—as well as a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. Individual poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Free Inquiry, and Pleiades. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin. They also co-edit the literary journal, At Length, from their home in West Lafayette, Indiana. He currently chairs the English Department at Wabash College.
