a fisher(?)——————————————————————————————————
winks. a mink whose skin
shrinks makes berth. heads!
land ho! i am columbus, ohio!
port red hails inside mud throat;
easy does hold to bow breast.
take up slack & figure an eight?
rocking in place a mid- shore spring—
nothing worries me with yves,
while our captain tastes angler/fish.
nothing worries me, yves.
those years, pre-taphonomy,
seeming now a pelage gay.
you won’t keel, though chaffed.
strangle a pier & jig boom strikes, yet
dolphin stay. i wade, flaking
ballantine & dismay.
(april drowns by the end of day).
(seafloor exhausts) last breath on a marlin spike of sun-dried rays—————————————
on the airstrip in kathmandu, at aphanitic dusk, my mare
aground & the labrador betraying sound of one you’ve ensconced,
with whom i cross this blood-brain foyer; all our dreams have flown
yonder. great-horned sheep on the vegas strip meets shenandoah valley-gravity
at the foot of the great basin’s berry-age, in my dewlap season;
keratin springs out of scrubland sheaths of war
i'd envision. carson city deflating under a cloak of smoke & selenium.
the producer drains his pen, a tremor along his brain stem
sends wolf pack sniffing for lithium
but finding in the shaft a wolf alone, agglomerate i
to become ai (or so i think of this in 2026).
one night a mis-anchor traps some hundred ferry passengers
as the dock disappears under buoy-ants.
sailors wagging heads
like tulips with wet
feet snapping
in rain,
hitched to mast,
on the mississippi gone home-run indigoes like spreading loess. i surrender
the trawl to lovers on line one,
overlooking distant tunis from the rooftop oblivious to late light floods.
river dolphins resist seine twine, disturb my soundscape over dull whale-heads.
yet my captain triangulates a bleating,
summons gulf security for collar-fitting;
i drive my submarine to a plunge pool with worn tunnels to the moon.
masks & googles for satellite’s children
& my mate’s parabens for us saracens.
in a second wave of the pandemic,
coastal dunes bury herringbone bodies &
ignite mantle circuitry. escalate! leaven!
lithic cakes; offals simmer
broth; september leaves
embers, cinder corianders.
without old man butcher,
his antennae pointing at the hound,
the giftshop would vanish off my satellite
map & open only at twilight, for dinghy bats.
his tarp then, being a life-jacket.
imps hanging by their limbs leave a mummified mountain without their kins;
sweet bark floats by on cots of ice, drifting past the OPEN sign—
a western skink collapses inside my chest, slithers with ease down paths of alien frost.
the reptilian instinct is innocent until eaten. reptilian inactives shush…
we’re walking around a native mound in pitch black natchez beside two-barrel cacti, somehow
transported to west virginia by first light. here are the guts & birthmarks. while we see coyotes
busying in rabbitbrush, seeking gauze & tincture from a barber locking up his venture.
they coax feathers off the two-lane shoulder.
thus our road becomes a flying fish.
it reaches through a screen-
ing, to a podzol
EXIT? (well, this is it then, everest).
Zixiang Zhang has poems published in Consilience, Magpie Zine, Sonora Review, New Limestone Review, and others. He studied geology at Stanford University, where he published research on brachiopod evolution in the journal Paleobiology. Currently, he teaches Earth science at a high school in NYC and enjoys dry gardening, erging, sunbathing, and sundry. INSTA
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