The Forest & The Sea

We used to have a beach, but not anymore. Years ago, we spent a week in July smoking stale cigarettes and drinking peppermint schnapps as we watched the trees slowly rise out of the ocean waves. They grumbled their seasick anxieties, shaking the salt water from their spruce beards and picking out the jellyfish speared from the needles on their arms. Their roots squirmed through the sand, inching up like cat tail caterpillars desperate to kiss our windowpanes.

They were enormous, those trees. Their highest branches dragged gashes through the sky, parting seas of cotton for stardust sediment. And it rained for two days; I drank pomegranate tea from your bangs, your little brother almost drowned in his sandcastle moat…typical. And when their intersecting branches, rigid fingers and heavy overcoats of leaves strangled out our graying sky, you said, “You’ve gotten pretty pale, you know.”

Saplings would roam throughout the night in our suburban streets, sliding their mangled branches into our bedroom windows to steal our dreams. They played dice on our front porch, huffing paint from paper bags and getting our screen doors sticky with sap. And when you woke me up and asked if I wanted to do something fun, you covered my eyes and bit my tongue.

It wasn’t long before the mayor personally took it upon himself to restore the beach, to open our coasts back to the sky and sea. He filled his chest with saw dust, opened his right nostril to a mound of snuff on his right thumb, scratched his dog behind her ears and went into backyard cellar where he swallowed twenty-three honeybees and took his axe to the trees. But his chopping only angered the beasts and his tobacco spit stained their leaves so with a hollow groan and an inaudible roar, the trees opened up and chewed him with poison ivy teeth.
Now we’re not so sure there is a sea at all, we’ve wandered through the trunks of the wooden beasts for miles, but I can’t even hear the gulls anymore.