Two Poems

Another Bed in Hell’s Ocean

You first find Hell’s ocean on the seabed,
two feet planted on its bubbling and grainy surfaces.
Perhaps if one could glimpse the waters
from the horizon, no one would jump in,
thirst quenched.

All bodies on the bed drift upward,
a grace to those who are too tired
to fight its currents, those
who can’t swim until they learn
the dark waters are chiefly acid, and the lift
too slow for a burn so wet and constant.

Most often the bubbles collect a crown
around my mouth, a ring of barnacles that bite.
The sores they leave are bloody but under a violence
too turbulent to get infected, but then
there are times the bubbles work a way up
and through the entire skin of my face,
a gentle abrasive burning
from chin to forehead.

The skin takes and ejects into the ocean.
When it’s pulled away from me
I see myself in a way no mirror
could let me before the waters destroy the image.

Though I roam Hell in search of my brother,
I can only find myself. So many times my face has
let loose in this ocean. I used to think
the parts I left behind would leave me
the thinnest of what I was. I see now
that what’s left after hurts and darkness
are most potent, thickest, the shapes of which
I work hardest to determine if they make me
sick or the proudest I’ve ever been, but is it
for this question I’ve had my brother traded?
If I loved him, I never said it, and if I never found him
I wouldn’t need to be afraid.

At Some Point, Light Lets Through

After a while floating
through Hell’s dark waters,
enough light lets through
for you to see other bodies
floating inevitability upward
and disintegrating. So long
as you keep a distance, the acidic
waters make beauty of us.
Millions of fizzing bubbles
lift from our bodies’ slow burning
and glimmer. We turn with
the currents, sometimes making
angelic movements,
our clothes orbit wraith-like ruin
around us, and the ocean
makes wild spreads of our long locks
of hair. The viewing itself
is magical. The acid
clouds and fades the image
in our eyes, then between
burning them to complete darkness,
returns the image, briefly,
with the sharpest resolution.
This realm of Hell is one in which
it’s most true what happens
to one happens to everybody.
At some point on the way up,
something changes.
The water clogs with bodies.
I remember I once floated
closer and closer to another one,
a lady I guessed was my age.
At one point between our tossing,
close floating, our eyes met,
and though the image was cloudy
we reached to each other
until our hands met,
and though we were both burning,
and this close the beauty
I described had long left, we smiled
and held on past when our hands
became bones and raw flesh again,
until the drift broke
us apart. I remember after
we separated, I had so many questions
for her, who she was,
the person looking for her,
the person she was searching for.
Of all the bodies I could’ve
washed into, the two of us
decided to make a pair
with smiles we fought hard
to retain and remember,
that holding on to her hand,
that moment. I’ll never
see her again.

________

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and John Mackay Graduate Award and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. The recipient of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, his work also appears in The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, The Boiler, Honey Literary, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.