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Quantifiable

There are eleven lighthouses on your coast and
each one is brick, stone, cast iron lonely. Ocean,
the loose skin of an animal stripping itself against
coastline. One deer grazes on the foxglove back here
away from the sea’s graffiti, and I mainline a bottle
of Kraken black spiced rum. The idea was to make
every tea towel in your kitchen a ship’s flag, every
table cloth, a sail. The idea was to arrange your spices
by scent, to sell off the silver. To show how latitudes
can become horse, and how through my own pink heart
I put oars, and out my back sprout wings. I wanted
to find a way to explain to you why it is important
that the sun is now 23.5 degrees lower in the sky,
that the idea was, there are quantifiable ways
to say goodbye.

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Val Dering Rojas is a Los Angeles based poet and artist who has also studied addiction and recovery counseling and psychology. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Dogzplot, Right Hand Pointing, Connotation Press, Arsenic Lobster, and Pirene's Fountain among others. A multiple Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee, Val is also the author of the chapbooks TEN (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Waspfish, a semi-finalist for the Glass Lyre Press 2016 Kithara Prize. (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) When not writing, Val is usually obsessing over Austria or Amsterdam, aliens or angels, and her Dutch vs. German language apps, although Spanish really should be her concentration.