Alex Mazey

Bread and Salt

The lighthouse was somewhere in the south of his country, that stood unused in the wet smoke that rose from the sea, maybe no more than ten metres below the candy stripe, that looked no better now, than as the day it was painted.

No longer a boy, he works twelve hours a day, with two cigarette breaks, because he is lucky. An Atlantic oil rig with cold fingers that reach deep in to the earth, dredging the old bones of what’s left. I don’t know what else to say.

So much of nothing can be said, and is said. Words like a substance can spill in to the ocean of myself like a secret. Give me something. Twelve hours a day to forget everything. Two cigarette breaks and the smoke that might rise from the sea.

Give me all of what you cannot drink and should never taste. Give me the taste of your cherry pierogies, and the name of your sister who cooked them in butter. Tell me how she left her life of turning down bed sheets before she left again to die.

Tell me about our board of yellow wood, our father’s boots resting together on the tools of someone else’s construction; where we’d work in the rain, and in the sun, and in the winter. Where we’d wait for the engines to melt the snow in to ice.