On the stone beach a black cat sits,
obsidian pressed to a low altar.
Waves inch up and find her paws,
break on that narrow shore of fur
and split into two dark gullies.
In her green eyes the day trembles,
small panes of bottle glass lit from below.

Crow feather, bottle cap, salt foam, a child’s shriek,
umbrellas casting their burned-in shadows,
everything leans toward that green glass
and drops like coins into a box
no one opens. She waits
while the shoreline redraws itself
outside that glass.

I sit beside her, beer warming in my fist,
today’s small argument caught in my teeth,
worked down to a tasteless chip. I tilt the bottle
till the green bottom swells with my eye.
I want to step through, live inside that circle,
a chapel of green light, a narrow nave
with no tide at all, yet even here
my body leans seaward;

when I cry, the picture thickens to jelly and grit
grinding bone until my sockets sting.
Cat, keep your narrow green window,
that small steeple anchored in glass.
I lower my heavy fist onto my knee
and watch the waves cut ravines without us,
stone by stone, like a hand emptying its pockets.

---

Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, ONE ART, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.