Home > PRISM Online > “Ways to Leave, or Waves” by Miguel Perez – Winner of the Pacific Poetry Prize 2021
Ways to Leave, or Waves
The lilies are losing their petals in pairs and I linger like resin in glass. Every possibility waits at the center of a sunflower wilting
in the vase atop my bookshelf, beside the uncalibrated clock blinking an old time, a loud green like algae.
All this wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t crossed the sea. What was it all for? – to smoke cigarettes on some balcony and hear waves crash?
Two seagulls fly from one horizon to the other, in opposite directions. I feel the early morning in my brittle bones: yucca fibers and sour milk.
Splatter me across your blood-water sunset, your curdled clouds and ocean veins, your silhouettes of palms splitting duplexes in two, your briny swirls of Van Gogh air, that gold-dappled moon.
Let the water drown you late into the night and sleep. Deep through coral and chain yourself to the seabed.
Saturate the mind with good, with leagues, with bioluminescence, limp and floating helpless in a world too busy flooding to love you.