Bones and Gold
A monkey skeleton clutches a coin, gold winking
time-weathered disc, weakly fizzing
ectoplasmic glow
Deep-grotto eyes fixed on stars that do not shine,
cheerless chiseled grin
unveiled skull
with silver rings, a dapper vest, a plumed tricorn hat—
the captain, perhaps? For all the brains he showed
when facing the storm.
Murderous blue
shark tooth ridgeline, agitated
like a liar’s polygraph.
Each swell, a prayer to Varuna,
foam and salt, folded over like dough
kneaded by the black hands of a vengeful god.
The ship, her men and ingots,
sank like stones, rich and heavy as pastéis de nata.
Distempered tempest—worse than wolves.
Below, nothing seen or heard.
After the plunge
a series of centuries
free from day, seasons, sense of time.
Will-o’-the-wisp, cold currents, gnawing jaws,
drifting scales, like dust. A bejeweled scepter
and steel swords, the fangs of man
smiling sinister in the meat-stripped mandible of a leviathan.
Starfish sucking at ribs, stuck to ancient planking,
moving across a broken mast,
a crow’s nest submerged in sand.
Fortunes lost. Lives lost. Ghosts in the infinite dark.
A timber figurehead—a lion or a saint—face down,
anchored in the mud. Bones and gold; a maritime crypt;
a Plutonian palace where the sun is
dead, gone cold—
where light, with any warmth, is myth.
Great pearls, like squid eyes,
flash in the gloom.
Squid eyes, like great pearls, watching, never blinking.
Lampreys and goblin sharks;
nature’s mistakes, never meant to be seen.
Echoing cries—tortured, Hadean, primordial—
and somewhere, once upon a time, a beach
Sand like diamonds; Malacca, with its sunsets of gold.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, BULL, Bottle Rocket, Reckon Review, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His collection, Those Who Remain Quiet, is available from Anxiety Press.
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