Charlie Clark

Pleasure Seeker, Spurned, Watching Sea Birds on the Beach at Dawn

First saying 
                   plover 
if only so 
the mouth 
can linger 
on the o
             can imagine 
it an egg 
coming delicately 
whole out of 
the soft hold of 
the mouth 
                then 
for the idea of 
lover mispro-
nounced 
               making 
the egg 
a lover’s gift 
                   spoken 
                   moaned 
                   stolen 
by a lover’s 
lover’s fingers 
beneath this 
bloody splash 
of morning
shadows 
               of 
what in shadow 
could be 
a plover’s nest’s 
stray tines 
                or rope 
                or vines 
                or in 
the complicating 
shadows of 
the mind 
a spool of ser-
pent bodies 
sprung new-
born and hungry 
from the ocean 
and in this 
light an over-
stippled nightmare 
white 
              each by 
instinct already 
whipping toward 
the dunes 
                  hissing 
over whose 
pleasure it will 
be to hollow 
out the body 
of the o
           to crush 
the plover 
          to have it 
over every other 
creature their 
heaving eager 
tongues discover




Charlie Clark's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, The Laurel Review, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and other journals.




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