Strange Dancers pt. 3

3. Children of Earth and Ocean

Here is a moment:

Domine in the Perhentians

An argument between the ocean and the land

A young boy watches his belly fat and his skin like

Dried coconut husks and he is in the middle of the tug

His boat is red and teal and an outboard motor is choked and ready

He kicks his legs along the measures of the ocean

Its troughs slapping against 

Grasping for the bleached wood 

He has for many summers neglected to paint

His craft is weighted and in lulling waves his eyes close.

Boxes of tangerines and coffee though he desires neither

Overweighted and enduring the tide with anchored bylines

The call to prayer rings out on the radio from

Kota Bharu but no one stops 

Women in their headscarves obedient to the trade that 

Paints the boat and fuels the motors and fills the beds 

And otherwise consumes the business of the day

The women committed to the business of the day

Scarves glittering like jewels on the arms of infrequent tourists

Pale and watching the boy fight the boat’s urge to capsize in a swell

Watching women thick of trunk load crates up narrow stairs

Wading out and back wrapped in glittering veils bearing geometric images.

There is a flicker of the daylight and

Its unquestioned ubiquity is Compromised 

All present are arrested of agency 

For a moment too brief to grasp

Amplified by the break in the sunlight the Mirage 

Rises from each cardinal point and sands rear up beneath us 

A wall of white sands our trident with entangled arms

Diatoms grazing us and lacerating our final boundary

Thrust towards the sky and below us all are

Enveloped by a cackling Mirage.

The Mirage convulses and It like the sky flickers

Grasping Itself, Its gut and like rolling dusk Its dark veneer

Lowers towards the horizon along the entire circumference of the sky

It wails and a sucking sound of such proportion so as to subsume thunder

And cracks of gunfire from belligerents unseen

Pulls our hearing outward into a reverberating vacuum.

A newly naked virgin girl spills from the black Mirage

A labial vibration ejects her as a vomitory slipstream

Into the argument between ocean and land and into the boy’s boat

Her head is wrapped with a nearly fluid film, a remnant 

The now sun-spotted constancy of the Mirage’s veil

Even as the sun raises boils on the girl’s body in her nascent exposure

Her former cohort trembling as they perceive their own exposure

Her eyes of a striate palette and flesh accompanying and they see they are

Her left iris black as the ash-speckled midnight which hems the Mirage

Her right iris the tarnished gold of our own skin beneath the fissile sun

And its nuclear gleam of white sheen of tears glinting on her corneas

Her placental veil choking her as she spits up oxygenated amniosis

It is her vestigial propriety which alienates her in this exposure

Even as to her we are endeared by the subjection we now share.

Aisha she is and a virgin with rough husked breasts

Henna'd toes in the tide in which her feet hang limply

The ocean rinses the rocks below her feet of afterbirth

Her head covered, a diaphanous gauze

Embroidered with copulating pairs of creatures

Geometric in their adherence adverse to true depiction

Her form and physique an hourglass of sun-roasted brown

Her time already internally ticking in unseen granules 

Which duplicate the boils Aisha’s youth sloughs off

Sun plays on her breasts and belly

Her limbs likewise in geometric proportion 

Like an embroidery herself along the shore on the boat where once

The replaced boy was before and perhaps in Aisha’s presence he persists.