• ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Literature, PoetrySeptember 17, 2013

A Dreamed Seascape

It starts out cool, like steel

behind your neck, tickling your hairline

even before you hear the sound.

Then the brass bell clangs, your eyes open.

Iron gray skies, no horizon. The sea

is slate, still. What passes for light

 

weighs heavy on you. Pray for a light

wind. Your body wants the swell that bounced the steel

buoy, rang the brass bell. The Sargasso Sea

should be bright, if still. Gray lines

casting sharp shadows on the open

sails. Dolphins should play and sound

 

bright blue, teasing you (you are sound

asleep. This is a dream of ancestral light.

You’re no sailor). But here, the open

ocean is flat, unforgiving as the steel

fixing your keel. You’ll never reach the line

that may mean land, an end of sea.

 

It’s not dark. Just too dull to see

shapes. You remember the bell, its sound

nearby. Some cable, some line

fixes the bellbuoy here. Running lights

reveal nothing. Perched on the bow, grasping steel

cables, cold and sharp, that cut open

 

palms. Nothing. No island, no ice. Just open

water, closed sky. This ugly sea

is endless (even knowing you sleep you steel

yourself for cold disaster). The sound

of the bell fades. Then the sun falls flat, light

comes right at you from the west. A line

 

of white, sharp wavelets. Lines

of wind on water. Your eyes wide, lungs locked open

as if it were solid, as if you could breathe light.

The sun slips low, painting an edge of the sea

orange, briefly, then it’s gone. Soft sounds

of water slapping the dull. a creak of steel

 

cable. No stars. No lines. Even the sea

has vanished. You want to open your eyes. The sound

of an alarm. You wake, grabbing all the light your eyes can steal.

 

~ Mark J. Mitchell

 

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies “Good Poems”, “American Places”, “Hunger Enough”, “Retail Woes” and “Line Drives”. His chapbook, “Three Visitors” has recently been published by Negative Capability Press. “Artifacts and Relics”, another chapbook, is forthcoming from Folded Word and his novel, “Knight Prisoner”, was recently published by Vagabondage Press.. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.

Featured artwork: Untitled (gouache on paper), by Babar Moghal.

Tags

Mark J. MitchellPoem of the Weekpoetrysestinas

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleAdoration #6
Next articlePlanting the Willow

You may also like

Billy Luck

To the Depths

Dearly Departed

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Editors’ Films of the Year

The Missing Slate’s film team, joined by other editors, review the year in film, picking the one film that stood out for them in 2013. What were your picks?

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at [email protected].

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
A Life Worth Living?

Just over five years after the untimely demise of David Foster Wallace, guest writer Isaiah Ellis revisits the underlying narratives...

Close