BB&B Presents: Sanderling

Today's post is brought to you by BB&B's writer in residence, Cassidy Grattan. His skill of unifying the myriad worlds of the intertidal and littoral zone, both in the written word and in philosophy, has not been matched since the days when Ricketts and Steinbeck roamed the Great Tide Pool. - Felonious Jive

they are stitching the sand together. their beaks the needles, weaving together the endless worms. a great golden rug growing and unraveling is the coastline. bill bottomed out, their eye balls leaving faint, ephemeral dents in the sand. are their eyelids closed at moment of whisper impact? to violently stab with your face, forever.

so we went running across the constellations in the sand, some avifaunal braille the cluster of birds had made.

a group of eight pelicans stiff winged above the dunes, passing us every so often. 'they are tethered to the sun' Sandman says. lips wet with pear juice. Sandman, those pears, youreallyknohowtopickem

so many dead birds. strange fruit these auklets, small burnt eggplant along the wrack. seal skull, wrapped in bloodied parchment. pelican jaw, we stretched the pouch out. Skyguy feeds it an ice plant flower. rolled some logs looking for legless lizards. found none but buglife.

awhile back, a bit further south from here, perched on a jetty, we watched humpacks gulping and breaching not one hundred feet away. grown ass men shrieking. elderly women cooing. children unable to move, enchanted by the monsters. i couldn't stop watching the folds of its throat, flesh obsessed. encrusted with massive barnacles, nudibranchs somewhere in there. the water streaming down through the troughs. thousands of skeleton shrimps on its head, genitals, wounds. its face wrapped in these algae eaters. dead skin eaters. sometimes picking at the whale wounds.

further back, north of here, at the mouth of the pajaro, skimmers and snowman plovers. an enormous whale vertebrate. it made a good seat. my own spine terminating in a massive final lumbar. thought of Ahab and his narwhal stool. poor Ahab. flesh obsessed. perched upon tusks. perched upon teeth. of course he ends up in the mouth of the whale. I escapes by coffin. doomed ark floating upon the sea. before he is fed upon by frigatebirds, I sings the entire tale to the wind, the water, the glowing plankton. Melville hears it from them.