I saw my first sea in springtime; will always remember my sister was running this full-fall sprint way from our group – a Midwest, crackling tumbleweed – for the roaring explosions of waters on waters and wave-winds and dying sun-dog purple-blue. Underfoot, in the clear water, mushroom clouds panting; puffing and blowing out rocks and the sand with each foot and fall. “You. Come over here, Monsoon,” you say – beckon with long, thrown finger bones; and just because it is this first time, so, now, do you expect each storm comes at your beck and your call. Dear Friend, Hi again. Have you ever noticed that they say “water was smooth as the glass,” but never “stormy water is just so very shattered?” Or maybe they do say that, but I'm just not reading the right types of poetry book. Like how the sand – when you stand in it, right beneath tide – you know, friend, it pulls you down, in some black-morbid way. Crashes in. Swirls. And then you fall a bit, and you are covered. It makes you think in hugs, though; like, that first night again, when it was omnipotent and sighing, heavy, this annoyed creature. I just wanted it to love me so badly, because I had come all that way just to see it, you know? (Culty. Cthulu. I know.) So I rolled my jeans at the ankle and stood a step closer to it, and I even kept list’ning when the wind (and not I) was let to brush out its knotting curls. It's what you do when you first-love things – dead-love things: making them pictures-in-your-eye kinds of things; Photoshop-at-the-edges-and-tint kinds of things; let the lightning strike the waves, sunken, flash; and remember the shards, smooth as glass kinds of things, in hand-carved deck-wood frame kinds of things. But these goddamn grains of sand… Sifting. Sieving. Walking. Leaving. Falling. Falling away... ...Coming away, like associates and friends; this career; Bee the Cat; homes and parents, their calls; ampersands; a resumé; some time and some sleep; or maybe just some of your dignity; the whole of the 2013 Kansas City Chiefs football season; my siblings, their interests and several days lost – March, September, December – that were supposed to be their own, but that were so very not their own. Divided rather finely. Running, running. Under-foot – nearly falling – pulled up in a hand; those kinds of things – whispers of bruising thunder; thunder, and all, like veils: just so taken to blowing away.
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C.D. DyVanc is an award-winning Missouri journalist, and, in his free time, enjoys jumping out of airplanes, reading, and being the epitome of the living dad joke with his fiancee and stepson. His works have appeared in Dream Pop Press, Five:2:One's #thesideshow, Well-Versed, and the hybrid art exhibit Interpretations V. His chapbook, rhi(n.)oceros, won the 2017 Midwest Chapbook Contest, and is currently available through Greentower Press.
