Elizabeth Ayrey

She could call them out  

  more reliably than anyone:   

      pale wrists offered up to the Avon, 

         palms outstretched, searching       

           for their soft skin   

          in the gloom. 

     Perhaps the secret  

          was plum-scented.  

             I get a taste of it as I lift her hair 

                   away from her neck, caught  

                        in the collar of a cream blouse. 

                             We were dressed for piracy  

                           that night, her eyes wide  

                        and dark like  

                   a Homeric sea.  

              Or, really, more like the Kraken 

          we downed to fortify us  

      before Christmas drinks   

  with our coworkers. 

We barely made it out  

       of that escape room alive.    

          Later, a river black as molasses  

             carves our path along the promenade. 

                    It’s here she suggests  

                       we go back to her parents’ 

                 for an absinthe ritual — and her tone says  

             heavy on the ritual.  

       I’ve been there only once before:   

     a real swamp of a place,  

          all bevelled glass 

             and creaking weatherboards  

                that practically beg  

                    for the salt marshes 

                 to reclaim them. 

        In the city at night it’s easy to imagine 

        the river as wanting, neon surface glare 

    hiding something dusky and sinuous, 

 estuarine limbs that quest 

   like an amorous sea monster 

      across the plains.  

         We meander back  

            to the boatsheds 

               to pick up her things;  

               the air’s sobered up now 

             in the easterly wind.  

        Intimations of anything  

                further shatter blindingly 

             in the security light. 

      Some things are predictable  

           but we tease at them  

              again and again, anyway:  

                 like pressing a finger into tender skin, blue-black,             

              or a hand trailing ripples in the milky film, 

          finding eyes that gleam gold, and,              

      beneath the boardwalk,                     

  an uncountable number  

of teeth.