Shipwrecked, Christmas Eve 1886

For the C. Annie Maguire

Cape Elizabeth, she stalled, homage to

the ocean before it dawned:

her form lay by the mollusks.

The lighthouse fog horn

carried, around that time

Longfellow had come and

written a postcard to the sea, diest,

right before Annie Maguire expired.

The beach plums and their hard fruit

pods were all blossomed, the spirits

were listless and needless. In the hull,

souls laid out, naught in prayers, jail cell,

ripped clothes haunted the long line

like clothespins, the trade dazed screams,

above in salt slick windows, tender churl.

I see you growing in me,

keepers of the lighthouse.

The knuckles lusty against the howling wind,

tidal black ducks, stacked crates of

bleached ice crystal outcrops,

and disdain, unused beauty entombed

from atop the lighthouse. Who refute your lives, oppressors?

Over snowed, the substance within, reeling,

winter’s ragged face, something more vital:

salted beef, macaroni, chicken pie

the guests mingled, the hull forgotten,

the hot stove, buckshot and chains,

on howling ocean bartered with

petrified eons of shipwrecked

lives that didn’t live to eat and didn’t sleep

but memory refigured through the broken rigging.

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Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq. has published poetry in Prelude, The Write Launch, Meniscus Literary Journal, The Florida Review Aquifer, Panoply, Paradigm, and was featured in Silver Needle Press’s poem of the week. He has forthcoming poems in Yes Poetry, The Westchester Review, Watermelanin (for writers of color), Cold Mountain Review in the Justice Issue, and Swimming with Elephants. He has a day job as an Assistant District Attorney as a prosecutor.