If you look hard enough through the fog you can almost see the Queen.  Somewhere across the shipwrecks and the ice.  I rock back and forth on the rocks, my feet turning them to dust.  Tonic water long forgone for the bottle.  Just gin.  I open my mouth, and it tastes like severed lumber being hauled off to living rooms in December.  The air tastes of the cold wetness of a sailor’s ghost.  I touch the air and it is thick with loss, with widows in windows, with the blackness in the sky, and the absent lighthouse.

My bones rattle against sinew.  I’m cold but I can’t move.  I lay back and look straight up the agape mouth of the Earth, searching for the ruler of the tides.  She’s absent tonight.  Maybe she’s off shitfaced somewhere.  Maybe she’s off forgetting her own name.

The icy water scratches at my toes.  I ball up my socks and feed them to the greedy, lapping sea, my ankles a bloodless green.  My feet are seizing with the cold, so I submerge them a little more.  Numbness breeds relief. 

I swing the glass bottle to my mouth.  I lean back.  I swallow myself whole.