PIHM Poetry: Sea Hearted / The Wretched Creature is You
Sea Hearted
The sea is coming in heavy now;
gray, twisted by moonlight, corpse-ish.
It stretches slow foamy spindly fingers across the white sand, dragging back ghost-shelled crabs and wriggling seafleas.
You sit on the balcony of your stout stone lighthouse, huddled by the low-light rusting gas lantern for warmth,
or what you think you remember as warmth.
The wind is cruel for the summertime, sharp
unforgiving.
In the near-total darkness you can almost choose to mistaken the movement below for shadows.
You can almost choose to mistaken the movement beside you for shadows too.
The dark claw marks left in the sea’s wake are slowly swept
and distorted by the drag of soaked clothes belonging
to the drowned.
They walk the beach blindly, shivering under moon’s pallid touch, whispering their last thought desires:
I don’t want to die..I don't want to die.. I’ll never see my wife again, thank g– Land–it’s land!
Dad?
Beside you, the movement you choose to mistaken grunts softly.
You turn out the light.
“That was rude,” his voice is raspy, salt-stripped.
In the late evening, when you found him, his lips had been chapped too. You delight smelling the fresh blood now, hearing the quiet crinkled split of skin, as he tries to talk around the wound.
“They’re attracted to light,” you try not to think about his hair, dark curled and staining the beach like a shored jelly. “Best not to gather their attention.”
“But now I can't see you.” His hands are on your face and you close your eyes, breathing the sea on him—in out in out—breathing acidic
human sweat.
“Did you rescue me? My name’s J–”
You stick a spoonful of canned pees in his mouth and point sharply below. There is enough moonlight to outline shapes, to follow movement.
A sailor child sits on the slick rocks meeting the sea, sobbing.
The dead cannot hear, cannot smell, anything but the tide’s drowning
call. But J does not need to know that.
His voice wakes your hunger.
It has been a long time since the village sacrificed to you.
“What are they?” He whispers around the spoon, teeth clunking against silver, cold hands searching for the rest of the can. You push it
into his palm.
“Davy Jones is dead. The sea-slain are climbing out of his chest. They’re waiting to cross over.”
He hums, vibrates like the ceaseless thrum of water below “And what do you do here?”
“Starve.”
He raises the spoon to the mouth at the base of your throat
His aim is low, you do not know if it’s intentional. “I don’t mind sharing.”
The vegetation is sickly, putrid, preserved and fresh.
You lean forward, scraping the ground mush with your blackned tongue.
A breeze comes in hot, announcing the coming of the sun. He shudders and crawls closer, bumping your crooked hand. His five fingers fall short against your ten
and his pinky brushes your sixth absently.
“It’s my first sunset in a long time, I’m
nervous.”
“Mmm.” You try not to think about the way his eyes looked half-rolled in his skull; brown watery orbs, muddled in swampy flashes of green and blue.
You try not to think about the way they would burst between your teeth. You try not to think you try not to think you try not to you youyou—
“Are you alone up here?”
The moon is low enough to slide it’s pewter tentacles across his face, carving mountains and valleys of his scars. One comes cleaving
his top lip in two, and you wonder if all humans are marked
that way at birth. You’d seen it on the dead with faces left to
admire, not yet scrubbed clean.
You’d felt it blemish each sacrifice sent stumbling
up the rocks into your many many arms.
“Alone is a strange word. No.”
Birds and seaside crickets are waking, grooming and coaxing
the sun to peak it’s blistering head above the settling waves.
The sky is smearing with fresh pinkish blood and oozing oranges. His eyes are on you.
His neck is puckered and raggedly torn by ages-old octopod prints.
“You should be looking at the sun,” your voice is faint, coming out of one mouth and finishing through another.
“I’ll have more mornings, thousands of them. I only have one with you.”
The dead dissolve again to foam, frothing the shoreline as light peels away the night. They will return tonight
and the night after that
and the night after.
The air is warm now, rife with the fertility of summer, woven with song and seagull cries.
“What makes you so certain?”
He traces the secondary set of eyes under your primary, the ridges on his thumb pad catching the sharp crags of your skin.
Blood blooms, running hot and human down the twisting
textures of your face.
You keep your desperate starving tongues still; pressed hard against the backs of your teeth.
“Why would you let me look at something so handsome twice?”
It’s too much, too soon.
His index is tracing the lip at your throat, pushing it back to feel slick sharp teeth.
You shiver.
“I never gave you my name.” His voice is sweet
too deep too deep too deep. “Jonathan David Jones.” He laughs
and
you’re far gone.
On the shaded end of the beach where he’d lain his corals crustaceans shells barnacles— tentacles stay un-scavenged.
The pieces splay man-shaped, octopus-shaped across the sand
unclaimed
by bird, crab, sea.
You crouch and crush them between your teeth, hungry hungry starved.
The Wretched Creature is You
"Andrew" It says, voice plucking
at borrowed vocal cords from the man You loved once
—who traded His beating heart in the place of Your still one.
"Yeah?"
You're both laying in bed,
the artificial Burger Prince moon round casting warped blue
light across the motel room.
The room smells rancid,
dust-born.
"Do you feel close to Him when you lay with me?"
Your daggers are scattered,
glints of violent silver abandoned amongst a dark rummy stained carpet,
which match
Your new bruises.
You want to tear out Its throat,
slurp down those vocal cords—
those wispy human strings that do not belong to It. You want Your hands around Its throat, thrashing, until the wind pipe snaps like kindling.
More than anything,
You want to drink yourself off the road.
But when normal people die so does the sound of their voice, and a world empty of those rich deep tones isn't one You could push Yourself through slowly by the hour
so you say "Talk about anything else."
Its teeth catch the false moon glow, sharp
overcrowded in a borrowed jawbone.
You don't know who that piece belonged to,
but it had to of been someone handsome.
You find your nails sinking into Its cheek, nails raking for blood.
"Touchy touchy tonight Andrew, aren't we?" Fingers you do know grab Your throat squeezing
until Your hand drops.
"That's a bad quality in an exorcist."
The thumb came from a young girl who'd slipped in the forest last year.
The index a mechanic who'd smiled too wide, was too helpful, hands too quick to flirt with a thing that was patchwork.
You have helped It harvest so many times before,
but the twist-and-knot of your stomach does not leave.
Did they deserve it Andrew?
How many lives are worth His voice?
“No I... I don’t know.”
You think about the split tongue that had been between your legs, minutes ago. Who did that belong to?
Did they used to know It?
Did they once love It?
What part of You will It wear
when Your favor finally no longer lasts?
You frown, deep.
"Andrew, stay with me, you're floating away."
A laugh wheezes past your stinging lips. "I have to go."
Your phone has been ringing, endless, for the last twenty minutes. You could almost pass it off for the world's worst smash track
"Don't you always?"
"People are dying."
"That's what humans are born to do."
The cheap motel clock glows a fuzzy red 3:55.
If you leave now You can make it to Oregon by tomorrow's nightfall. You can stop
at the diner—dim outskirts of town—for a greasy dinner.
You can drink in the bathroom and scrape Your tongue of the stench
and smile when the park rangers offer their hands, show You the photographs, ask for Your beastial supernatural expertise.
And You can lie
—oh how You love to lie—
about the fear squeezing your soul out clean.
But You want one more hour to play pretend.
In the dark, voice is all that matters.
You grab Its face and pull Its cracking lips down over your own and ignore the reek of decomposing bodies
seated neatly
rowed
along the wall,
Watching.
About the Poet
Alba V Sarria is a multi-award winning poet & flash fictionist with 30+ publications. Their debut book Night Life: A Folk Horror Poetry Collection received 13 honors & award nominations within its first year of publication, including being a Featured Book at the 2024 national Gaithersburg Book Festival and being showcased at the FDA’s 2024 Muirkirk Art Gallery.
You can find Alba on Instagram: @albasarriawrites
