Thomas A. Hiscock, January 2026

*** 

Granite spills across the low brown tide…  

Colonial bones, pierced by a thin blued blade, leaking to the sea…

Pylons, buried beneath the soft green loam; salt-stained – bruised purple with a limpet rash… 

Vertebrae rocks, shifting crabs…  

Blue mussels and teapot clams – dry, spoiled… 

Sweet decay and stinking mud. 

Low tide, wiped like shit across the cove: 

Brackish sweat, clouding flies. 

Stone hands and palms of shore – reaching for the blue sea.

Beech trees, peridot leaves and black knots – trauma scrawled across the bark. 

Hemlocks, starving thin, watch with a million unseen eyes – lurking behind the bank… 

Forest spears, turned against the August sky…  

***

A young man rounds the bend, stumbling over rocks and seaweed. 

He wears white sneakers and hemmed jeans, stamped with mud. 

There’s a disconnect… Like he’s coming and going – a backwards feeling… 

 The eelgrass whispers, pulling him close…    

Cigarette in hand, he shuffles along the shore…  

Then bright silver – warm in his palm; a cheap steel flask that retreats to his pocket… 

He shudders… wagging his tongue, beating his thin chest.  

He spooks the kingfisher, who chatters, dashing away … 

And the blue heron, who honks and flaps his mighty wings. 

But not the egrets, pure as porcelain…

Egrets are calm; herons are noisy. 

The kingfisher gossips, ospreys circle, and pink-tipped vultures fly above them all – gliding on cut black wings …

***

The young man wanders down to the flat water, pitching his cigarette… 

He lingers on a cluster of rocks, chewing his tongue… 

Here he was, amongst the low and empty… 

The mudflat spans for miles –  

A refuge – free of noisy neighbors and embarrassment… safe from painful traditions and company he’d rather not keep… 

So he slithered down behind the bend, sneaking away while his neighbors ran off into low tide. 

Stupid runners and that stupid fucking race… 

Stupid fucking neighbors… and his stupid mother, making him babysit… 

He was supposed to keep an eye on his little brother back at the beach… 

She went off to run the mud race, leaving him with a driftwood idol and a toddler… 

Not that he’d be caught dead slipping around in that filth… 

He brushes his filthy clothes, trying to wipe away his surroundings…  

Then teases another cigarette from the pack, and lights it, taking a drag… 

A deep, quenching pull –  

Like he could suck the answer to life’s questions from that small scroll of vice…  

He grabs a stone from the ground, picking between bits of glass and half-moon shells… 

He stands up, taking aim, and skips it across the small mouth of the creek; then picks up another and whips it toward the far shore…  

Skipping stones, waiting to die…  

They were running through the mud and he was stuck in it… 

He picks up a rock – fat and jagged, throwing it at the egrets – 

It falls short of the birds, and sinks beneath the water… 

 Egrets scatter like white buckshot, unaware of the irony…  

High above, a vulture screams – 

He’d walk right back – just wanted a smoke – maybe a few slugs of his drink…  

What was wrong with that? 

Goddamnit… Why was everything such a big deal? 

Fuck these neighbors. They hated him, and he hated them. 

The flask reappears, and he puts it to his lips, wetting his thoughts with a few slugs of booze. 

A woman screams – cutting through air, beheading the high summer sun… 

He coughs, choking on hot dark liquor… 

Confused shouts rise from the beach, singing around the bend… 

Then he hears his name  – 

A steel shriek of rage and pain…

Cold panic floods his heart… 

He drops his flask – amber liquid spills out, leaking into the spongy ground. 

He starts running, sprinting back to the dock… 

The cigarette falls from his fingers, still burning…    

And a fly – swollen green – spirals down, drawn to the speck of bright flame pulsing in the mud.  

***