Three Cornish Landscapes

By Richard Skinner:

i. Over Mevagissey Harbour

from pitch-black night
the first to encroach 
the horizon
a strip of milk-blue
seeping in minutes
into electric cobalt
then comes peach 
bleeding into pink-white, thus
re-enacting day
growing, glowing light 
develops the harbour
spots of red & orange buoys first
then boat names, shop fronts
no clouds yet manifest
the last to drift from  
darkness—
the gift of granite 
& gneiss

*

ii. At Chapel Point

Or sun rising
is a bath of 
golden acid, 
pure voltage, it 
baffles us with 
its infinite patience,
the great silence 
yellow turns to blue 
the day peals by 
autoharp of light 
later
curtain of winter
light, stopped
(hush/bloom)
into the simmerdim,
solvitur ambulando—stride side by side
into the west
Come 

*

iii. Polkerris Bay

coming down 
off the cliff 
through the trees
a bundle of stone buildings 
tantalise below
the setting sun 
scintillates 
through a tangle of 
miraculous leaves 
and the whole scene 
is an abstract painting 
of green on red
the wood spews us out 
onto the beach   
the small bay is a tight curl
with one harbour wall
tiny waves break like ripcords
on virgin sand
there is no depth, everything is on a flat surface 
the bright sky is a pulsing membrane
the kettle drum sun 
hums and all the world 
could plunge into it
at any moment

***

Richard Skinner has published six books of poems. His next collection, White Noise Machine, is out with Salt in June 2023. A great deal of his work has to do with his love of long distance walking and a sense of place. He and his wife spent December 2022 on retreat in Mevagissey, where these poems were written. 

Richard’s website

The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland. 

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Blowout Tide

By Joe Labriola:

You shift across the pebble-pocked sand, scouring the pale flaxen dunes for all manner of seaside treasures. Pink spiral shells and sand-smoothed stones are among your favorites, peeking out from the wild patchwork. But among these beautiful bits of beachside bounty, more than all else, you find trash.

You’ve noticed more in recent years. More and more. Harder and harder to ignore. Bleached water bottles and frayed strings sit tangled within the tidal muck. White bags hiss upon the tips of inland reeds, rippling in the cold March wind as if waving, as if wavering, as if breathing their surrender.

You aren’t a vagabond can collector or a hipster hobbyist. But you see. You see candy wrappers and drink caps. Glints of plastic waste simmer in the sunlit brine. You can’t say why you do it. You can’t say how much it helps. All you can say is that it just sort of feels like the right thing to do: picking it up, one piece at a time.

You and your four-legged companion work hard. Harder every time. You are the only two who seem to care, even as the ocean vomits more trash each weekend, seemingly to replace whatever you’ve filled your big black bag with, and then some.

“We just gotta keep at it, boy,” you say, struggling to maintain your balance upon a steep tuft as you pluck battered sandals and cracked milk jugs out of the weeds. “We’re doing good work.”

Your dog just sniffs and stares.

You continue this way for months. Years. You never venture beyond your route from the parking lot to the pier. There’s always plenty to clean right here. Always more and more.

But one day your old dog pants and wheezes. He sighs and slumps. The vet says he doesn’t have long. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But not long. You know the truth but don’t want to believe it.

“It would be for the best if we put him down,” the vet tells you plainly.

“Not yet,” you strain to say back. “Not just yet.”

The next morning you take your old friend for one final stroll. It’s breezy, breezier than usual. But that’s never stopped you before. It’s slowed you, yes, but never stopped. You follow your usual path. Of course you don’t come close to getting it all. You never do. But you needn’t go far. You still fill your bags, and that seems to count for something.

“Biggest haul yet, boy!” you say through a gust, loading your garbage and recyclables into the trunk.

The old dog gazes back at you with big, shadowed eyes. He tugs on his leash. A weak motion but with conviction all the same. Maybe he knows?

You glance up toward the opposite direction where you’ve never ventured on your weekly cleaning treks. But why not? Why haven’t you ever gone that way? Because you like your way? Because you’re just used to it?

You don’t know such answers. But you smile tiredly and grab one more bag from the car.

You trudge down the beach together into the cutting wind. There’s even more trash this way. Much more. “Won’t get it all today, boy,” you call down to your friend. You continue, smiling as best as you can.

You stop after you reach a sharp bend along the dunes. You almost turn around here where the wind is strongest, rippling your loose shirt. But then you notice a small brushy clearing atop a stout cliff not far in the distance. Perched upon its edge are a group of teenagers: five or six scraggly-haired youths. They lounge in various positions, surrounded by beer cans and take-out food containers. Some of the debris has already trickled down the crumbling wall of hard-packed sand. You watch for a while. One kid hurls a sack of fast food remnants out into the water. Another chucks a half-empty beer at his friend, who dodges and shoves his friend back playfully.

They all laugh freely.

You open your dry mouth to cry out. But the warm wind sucks at your breath. You stare for another moment, and then finally just plop down in the sand, watching the trash-ridden tide rise closer.

“That’s enough, boy,” you say, scratching your old dog’s ear. “That’s enough.”

***

Joe Labriola is an author, podcaster, and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His short fiction usually features some speculative or environmental lens with the goal of helping to raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. He regularly hosts beach clean up events, presents lectures, and tries to spread awareness however he can. You can most often find him scouring his local shores filming his detrashing experiences—and enjoying a swim once the water is cleaned.

The Bleak and Wild Desolate Shore

By David Murphy:

Along the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula—
harbored by sea stacks,
washed by the ablutions of frequent rain,
and scrutinized by the salmon-keen eyes of fierce eagles
who sit perched with feathers made wet and salty by ocean spray—
lies a beach spliced by piney evergreens and the wintry Pacific Ocean.

It wears as its mantle a cloak of becoming fog:
wide filaments of thick mist wreathe the beach’s shoulders,
narrow wisps tuck into the crevices of teeming pine,
and, like a stole, that pale brume softly embraces
the necks of the majesterial, protruding stones.
The beach’s curvaceous, serene form lies upon its side
with its back to the land, knees tucked up against the tide,
with its stone lips ever kissing the briny, icy waves.
Water is its heart. In the rain, in the sea and spume,
throbs the lifeforce that begets the beach’s growth and decay,
shapes its projecting stone fingers, and creates its austere beauty.

In the night, the wan moon with its grey craters
beams down on sword ferns glowing nearly phosphorescent
and flashes on the bottle-gold eyes of great horned owls.
The moon turns milky the evergreen forest that adorns
the beach’s hips, and the moon tints the bleached driftwood
from day’s ivory to an iridescent alabaster of night.
That moon casts upon the beach’s cliffs a lustre
that speaks of shining rock, and, with its hushing silence,
it seems to make the surf’s voice boom.
With wind, the beach’s trees move sinuously and with susurrant song.
In the moonlight, upon the beach’s damp and footless shore,
lie whips of bull kelp, washed up and drying,
with algae blades like Medusa’s chaotic hair, their origins
in the marine forests of stone mantlepieces and rocky shelves.

The crows cackle madly in their rookery, the wind whishes,
surf roars, eagles scream, seals honk and bark and cry,
clouds morph then rework their hues, tides ebb and rise,
marshy mushrooms rise and rot with the sun’s circling,
the fragrance of evergreen sap freshens the air, salmon run,
gulls bed their island colonies with bones, osprey preen and fish,
glossy baneberries bear fruit like murderous scarlet pearls,
and purple mountain saxifrage color the cliffs.

In antiquity, the Makah resided here
using yarrow for childbirth, red cedar for dugout canoes,
yellow cedar for clothing, spermaceti for candles,
stones buffed by water to high polish and wound
by withy willows for anchor stones, having halibut for dinner,
sea otter teeth and whale fins for art, cherry bark for basketry—
which tightens as it dries—and bones for awls and adze handles.
They used tides and stones and fences to catch fish,
laid white clam shells on the tidal floor for better contrast
to see the fish in their traps. On a crisp, windy spring night
six hundred years ago, the tribe gathered on the damp beach
after partaking in a feast of salmon, octopus, and halibut
for a sacred ritual conducted to send its rowers and harpooners offshore
in a twelve-seated canoe to hunt whale. A chief chanted,
sang, worked the crowd into a frenzy before the night fire,
and when the throng felt most animated, the chief
poured whale oil onto the fire, so that it soared, crackling to
a crescendo, rose like the wave of a tsunami, and
in the dark night the bellowing and shrieking
of the Makah were swallowed up by the forest.

Over this desolate beach there is a kind of peacefulness:
gently lapping waves, the soft pattern of rain,
the rustle of a crow’s wings. It appears desolate, Shi Shi,
here in winter.

***

David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in a small town in northern Oklahoma.  He attended public and private schools in Oklahoma and Louisiana.  He graduated from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University, and he studied abroad on scholarship at Lunds Universitet in Sweden.  Later, he worked in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank.  He worked in Riyadh, then he won two English Language Fellowships from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  He was posted to Mexico.  He then worked for four years in Washington state government as a Program Supervisor for Title III funds.  Now he lives and writes full time in a small Mexican pueblo near the Pacific Ocean.  

Plum Cove

By Emma Johnson Tarp:

The beach is smaller than I remember and it’s high tide and the water is so blue it stings my eyes, the back of my nose, the back of my throat and there, I see them:

Three boys climbing out on the big rock, their hands finding the same cracks, cracks they know on instinct, like breathing, from summers and summers of swimming-climbing-jumping, summers of returning here just as I return here now but not like that at all because I don’t know those cracks and it stings in my eyes and nose and throat that I don’t and look—

They pull their small, hard bodies up and out of the seaweed,

One tall and dark, too big for his trunks—

One compact, a square all-over—

One slight with a shock of blonde hair that glows against his sun-brown skin—

And they jump into the water and they don’t come back up 

Until 30 years later when they return with me for the first time and we will wade through the seaweed together, my blue-white skin on edge from it all and their skin now lined, lungs lined, with sand and sun from endless summers right here and one that never really did end at Desert Shield and they will find the cracks— cracks they know on instinct, like breathing— and they will stare at their hands like they are magical instruments then lay them on me, pulling me up to join them.

***

Emma Johnson Tarp writes stories about devotion, bodies, and liminal space. She studied literature and religion at William & Mary and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two rebel-hearted cats.

Americana – A trilogy by Shannon Finck

AMERICANA

Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.

I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants, 
hazy things.

My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.

Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse 
with no name I rode in on.

I love this dog, who is 
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.

I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.

Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.

*

INVASIVE SPECIES

Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost 
under a threadbare sheet, 
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count 
each long day left of July, 
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors, 
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch. 
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night— 
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise. 

I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium— 
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen 
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the 
trashed star map.

*

APPULSE

The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire. 

It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.

When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.

***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.