The Shelf

The Atlantic is a gray, flat plate

tilted just enough to keep the debris moving.

A piece of a cooler lid—white, jagged—

drags toward the sand then thinks better of it.

The water is a mouth full of phlegm.

Yellow foam gathers in the cracks of the shale,

quivering like something alive and sick

while the tide pulls the earth out from under my heels.

I stay behind the line where the salt dries white.

The horizon is a wall I can't climb,

and if I step in, I won't be floating.

I'll just be another piece of plastic the coast rejects.