Mendocino Sunset

A breaking wave
rolls among algae-covered rock crevasses
and lifts kelp to the cove.
White wrinkles
wrap basalt shoulders,
statues in the sea.
Fragrant in the water,
towing in the night.
The gulls active,
swooping—
One shout builds upon another,
while the half orb sun flattens
into the fog Pacific.
Sky reflects ocean
stone blue.
To be an old man
with a digger pipe
watching the sunset.

River

I lost interest in everything
a dry afternoon. Sun-stained
skin, sky too blue for eyes
beneath the steamboat pipes.
Listening to the river, listening
to webbed pressure in a dive.
A mother, fecund and unforgiving,
whose rippled arrows fortified stomachs of ancestors,
does not aim to betray descendants.



Jeremy Ford's work has appeared in the Duck Lake Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Cosumnes River Journal, and River River Journal, among other places. He lives in New Orleans.