Liquid Two Prose Poems by Shane Vaughan

Liquid

We stood at the cliff-face with nothing but air between us and the Atlantic and I told you that here the sea etches itself onto our faces, like we don’t wrinkle we ripple, as an ocean puddle sketched onto skin, and you said the same but different, said where you’re from the Adriatic drifts to the Mediterranean in slow scoops and the people scoop with it from one nap to the next, and there the sea’s etched, also, but less rippled more taut, stretched not sketched, like the water is glass at four in the morning, that magic hour, and you feel you could walk on top if you only had the courage to dip your toe in.

Be lined

It’s the lines you draw, when you stare from my eyes to my past, drawing shapes of what was and is and how all this is some sort of sick joke where we collide into each other and talk about how it’s all meant to be, how all those lines have run themselves dry, how they’ve balled into a point, into a full

stop

full, full of so much more than myself, like I’m a cup and you’re the water flowing over my rim. Hold into me, sweetness, I’m a shipwreck and you’re the ocean swallowing cargo and all until we scrape the earth again, pressured by the press of water’s weight, painting lines in the sand with muddied hands, watching the sift of shape, until barnacled, bereft of time, asking only how, and we will say it was the fault of lines.

Shane Vaughan is a writer of poetry, prose and plays. He has been published in Cellar Door, for which he won Best Prose, The Useless Degree, winning Best Flash Fiction, Roadside Fiction, winning a slap on the back from comrades. He has a serialized novel on JukePop Serials, runs an event called Stanzas for emerging writers, a theatre group called Cannibals Not Canadians, a music podcast called #KantKopeOrchestra and works for the Munster Literature Centre, where he makes coffee and tweets about poetry. He is currently writing a play and has a zombie love story coming out Halloween, 2015.