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The Spill
Slow Drown
Whitney Egstad
Whitney Egstad studies poetry at the University of South Florida and is currently applying to MFA programs. Her work is forthcoming in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival Anthology in 2011, but this is her first online publication. She would like to thank the West Florida Literary Federation's online journal, The Spill, for its creative action and perseverance in maintaining awareness about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Liquid quick
and dark like villains,
they haunted depths,
crept into sea shadows
and vomited a plague of vandals
to blacken the breath of the world
in toxic thrusts,
tickle the throats of waves.
A sad surf pants and coughs on
shores forlorn while we catch the small hands
of our children and pull them
from their sandcastles. They weep
oil trickles in thick clots
from their eyelids.
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