conversing with ocean in its own language by Brendan Nurczyk (16, Florida)*

OCEAN:
(waves crashing, wind whistling, sound of ocean spray, collision with midnight) 

I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it. The unraveling. The scorned breath of the ash tray, the pooled black dripping from its sides like god, broken-hearted in the almond tree mistaken for a movie theater. But this is how we danced, our teeth born to sea, bodies sprawled against the wet part of the sand, singing the song of our mothers' broken heels.

---

To all the things that make us sunburnt and lonely in July. Our shoulders spread with aloe vera and hope, our shoes filled with sand, so much sand grappling each part of our body that it never truly leaves us. Ten years later I dump the white sand of childhood out of my sock, as if it was that day I was white and innocent with it. We ask the ocean for reason and it gives us nothing but water, because that is all it has to offer, a kind of prayer, like black waves and burning eyes and confessions made just before diving into the riptide.

The woman on the beach is saying, 
“we’ve lost too much" as she dives into the waves to retrieve her child's plastic spade, red against the black of it all. 

At midnight, we tell the ocean secrets and it rises to meet us.
the only way it knows how: through the tides. 
Through the sounds of breaking moonlight, churning like empty summers spent in bed. The lightness of a name, how quickly its forgotten. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it, lying broken on a beach towel. Mid-December, my breath so heavy in my lungs it could have been smoke instead of self. Loss, like citrus, like siracha, an unforgettable first taste. Maybe there was something easier about it, the overbearing of being. That even in the sour of it all I was wafting through an orange orchard. Walking down the rows, orange like mercy, like no end. Still, skeletal on the beach. Like a beached whale in the sand, I am the ultimate oceanic ruin. 
It is then, two night nights later, that I walk solely into the fog. Shawled beach, the nights from the highway blazing like the voices I've left behind, the words that are held in the air but will never know this skin again. 
I ask the ocean one last time, now mimicking its lost carried ancient song for a reason. 

OCEAN: 
(sound: the waters overcoming everything.) 
left nothing but homage for being made noise.