i emailed out to a few lists “selling” my sailboat for the cost of a poem. The sailboat found a happy new home with Alex H, a MITERS member & Hannah & their baby. I did get another poem though, by someone who enjoyed the prompt, and found it again in my inbox just now:

J. Seale
On Impurity

True voyages are never maiden nor the hands that helm them
Fearful of falling afoul of that form.
Sometimes joyful but always impure the sea is impervious,
Gently hugging the shores it meets,
Lying spread betwixt them and a comingled firmament,
Then mounting and roaring in the face of rocks and spitting gods
in the same unconcerned coupling that brought about the first cell’s split.

In a permanent embrace that stays true only to its indifference,
disrespected creed, code, race, gender are all ignored in favor of
the same militaristic contract known to voyagers across millennia
with its blue-black ink of clicks and luffs
as a pledge to the unknown,
possibly beautiful and possibly vile,
signed each day in whatever bodily issue
might be demanded as partial payment
with trembling hand lashed to the tiller if so bidden.

On pain of death all who greet the cold wind from the rail
with digits raised on both hands
in so doing leave innocence on the dock
and instead thereby pledge to sport this same death as needed
while waking and dreaming, on hand and on brow:
As her breed I will respect the intricacies of the sea.

– For Nancy Ouyang, September 2017