Ninety Days

We’re standing at the ocean, a used sea-
shell peering nervously through your beehive.
Sunday trash blinks up at us through sandy
exoskeletons and footprints. It will strangle the seagulls
when they touch down to feed. Maybe in the dawn. Maybe in the dark.
Maybe the crabs will have gone home by then, tucked
in their pincers and blue blood.

Is the seagull nocturnal? I can never remember—
some poet!—but I remember the joke well:

What do you get when you cross a bird with a sting ray?

Beloved, this beach would wash your face out
if you were but one freckle less lovely.
When I showed up late to our first
date, I should have dropped to my knees
in the middle of that parking lot, rested
mismatched shoes on bird shit and magicked
my way to an instant one-year sobriety chip.

In this mythos, I am golden clean before
we wed. In actual fact, I am ninety days sober
seven years after the first blackout avalanche, and your eyes
startle me in the shock of the sun.

What do you get when you cross an alcoholic with a train?

At the water’s mouth, now, curled lip where the tectonic
motion sneaks toward our feet, I wonder
if you can hear my pulse. I cradle it in my swollen
coronary arteries, feel its echo in my bruised-for-two liver.
I wonder if you’ll believe me when I say, yes,
my pupils have always been this large.