Town After Town
Admirals in white salute sailors diving into great white mouths. Ensigns retrieve what's left of bodies on shore but never stain uniforms with one drop of blood. After the sun stops hurting the days, spectators are swept overboard by a giant broom, the devil's moustache with a handle. The glossy deck reflects the stars' lights, holograms of fire that can take the crew back into the past, when pirates buried chests like bones and murder was a hand-to-hand sport, and not another way to rid the vessel of excess weight. So, the dead ship continues emptying town after town, fills seas with skins and bones.
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Donald Illich has published poetry in The
Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, Roanoke Review, and New
Zoo Poetry Review. His work will be included in
future issues of Passages North, Nimrod, LIT, and The
Sulphur River Literary Review. He received a Prairie
Schooner scholarship to the 2006 Nebraska Summer
Writer's Conference.