SHORE

What it takes to cross over from beauty to terror can be either a slow drip or a quick incision. Tapioca pearls, then dirt in the mouth. The gentle heat rising off a flagstone path down the road from the crematorium. What have I done to deserve this life and its lifetime memberships to various warehouses? The run toward and not away from? The view into the dormant volcano I once comfortably dangled my feet over? My child holds his handcrafted glass sun catcher up to the light, the light restricted elsewhere.I think, I am shore, meaning subject to ebb and flow and accident.

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DESCENT

A leathery man at the dog park joins me on the bench, his posture like my dad's, his southern accent like his, too, bright as a row of backlit honey jars. He talks and talks. His words enter the loop of my leash and hang there upside down. You can't imagine shrieking like that. A cypress tree with over 300 pileated woodpeckers. More disturbing even than the sound of a mastiff latching onto my dog's snout. I remember the barely-audible scratch of my dad's fingernails on linen when we turned him in bed.

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TRANSITION

Rescues paw the dirt around my feet in celebration of how I stand apart. I exist as an animal extension of self, play obsessive thoughts in my head like sped-up video of dough rising in darkness. What to make of the difference in fit of the same dress one year later or that my dentistry practice is named after verse 6:6 in Song of Solomon: Your teeth are like a flock of sheep coming up from the washing? Sheep prefer to move uphill, which is the opposite of my body's trajectory. Last week, my son asked, Is there a border I can lay down on where half of me is cold and the other half is hot? We were talking about icefall doctors, who go ahead of the climbing party to install the fixed ropes and ladders on Everest. Who will lay the groundwork for me when I start burning up?

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COINCIDENCE OR HIGHER POWER

An hour before my father dies, a spam call for insurance: Good afternoon, my name is Angel, who am I speaking to? I find an unwrapped cork board on a bench in Central Park while on my way to buy a cork board. Underwater, I intuit there will be a car accident outside of the pool entrance and emerge to hear the collision. I feel conviction in the face of anguish. Our son loses his tooth on the Gravitron. A neighbor shows me a door in her garage that leads to concrete. At the Statue of Liberty Museum, I take the call, cry in front of the original copper torch. My notes app contains the language north shore radiance and opening up. My mother's childhood Madame Alexander doll's one remaining clouded eye follows me. The pyramid scheme based on fuelings works, briefly. The dream of Hollywood, having never been to Hollywood. The cycle ends. The curse loosens. Tethers become radiant, splendor holding us.

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These prose poems,  part of a new manuscript in progress, are meditations in a dog park.