Pirate Shack Dollhouse
1
Turn and there’s the sea
dressing and undressing the continent.
Slowly the tide comes in.
A winter storm pushed the beach a mile away
flinging out a femoral sandbar.
Under summer gasflame skies
the North Atlantic is the color of twilight
glittering with fireflies.
2
Beyond the salt the wild lawns of seagrass a line
of mcmansions: monopoly toys.
Up the beach closer to the lighthouse
there’s a place teenagers colonize
like a treehouse,
but treeless: only the bones of the tree set into the dune: planks
hammered into a rickety
open walled shack decorated with twists of driftwood
and lobster buoys
and two signs
one proclaiming CHATHAM RESIST 2015 another
almost illegible:
SHARKS COYOTES MOONCUSSERS SERVED HERE.
And recently two flags tattered by hard
wind: one stars and stripes
the other: blue and yellow.
3
Pirate dollhouse shack. Healing memorial.
How many have died today far away:
disappearing into their pain
an unstoppable wind riptide
undressing them to bone?
Bones are not nakedness any more than sand grains
and can’t be destroyed only buried unburied buried
in the moonlit fluid universe.
Turn and there’s the sea
dressing and undressing the continent.
Slowly the tide comes in.
A winter storm pushed the beach a mile away
flinging out a femoral sandbar.
Under summer gasflame skies
the North Atlantic is the color of twilight
glittering with fireflies.
2
Beyond the salt the wild lawns of seagrass a line
of mcmansions: monopoly toys.
Up the beach closer to the lighthouse
there’s a place teenagers colonize
like a treehouse,
but treeless: only the bones of the tree set into the dune: planks
hammered into a rickety
open walled shack decorated with twists of driftwood
and lobster buoys
and two signs
one proclaiming CHATHAM RESIST 2015 another
almost illegible:
SHARKS COYOTES MOONCUSSERS SERVED HERE.
And recently two flags tattered by hard
wind: one stars and stripes
the other: blue and yellow.
3
Pirate dollhouse shack. Healing memorial.
How many have died today far away:
disappearing into their pain
an unstoppable wind riptide
undressing them to bone?
Bones are not nakedness any more than sand grains
and can’t be destroyed only buried unburied buried
in the moonlit fluid universe.
Jan / Feb 2024
Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York City. Mary’s translation of the Haitian poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review, the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press), and in And There Will Be Singing, An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review, 2019. Her work has appeared in Lake Effect, J Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Soundings East, Barrow Street, and other literary journals. In 2022 Mary received two nominations for a Pushcart Prize.
Art: Donna Morello, Collage